Trump, Populism, and the End of the Neoliberal Order

Guest host and former LCHP Postdoctoral Associate Ben Zdencanovic welcomes Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle to discuss whether Trump and MAGAism represent the end of the neoliberal order. Gary traces American political systems starting with the transition from the New Deal order, which emphasized government regulation of capitalism in the public interest, to the neoliberal order that prioritized deregulation, free markets, and globalization under Ronald Reagan and later gained bipartisan support during the Clinton administration. Gary argues that the 2008 financial crisis undermined the neoliberal consensus, creating the conditions for the rise of populist movements across the political spectrum and the emergence of Donald Trump’s political project. He examines whether the United States is entering a new political order centered on MAGA and emphasizes the risks of democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. Gary highlights sources of democratic resilience, including civic activism and the possibility of a new progressive political coalition. 

Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is currently the Kluge Chair of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress. Last year he was Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. His works include over ten books, including his most recent book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era(Oxford, 2022) and his current project Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century(to be published 2027/2028 by Penguin Press)

Ben Zdencanovic is an Assistant Professor of U.S. History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His research as a historian looks at the United States in the world, domestic and international politics, and social and economic policy. Ben was the inaugural Postdoctoral Associate at the LCHP. Ben is currently working on two book projects. The first is titled Island of Enterprise: The United States in a World of Welfare, 1940 – 1955 (forthcoming from Princeton University Press). His second book is tentatively entitled The Cold War on Poverty: Race, Labor, and Manpower in the U.S. Warfare/Welfare State.

Transcript

Narrator 0:12

Welcome to the History Politics Podcast, putting the past to work from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

Ben Zdencanovic 0:40

Hello and welcome to the History -Politics Podcast. I'm Ben Zdencanovic, and I'm the host of today's episode. For decades, beginning in the 1980s, American politics was organized around a broad faith in markets, globalization, and deregulation. In recent years, that neoliberal consensus has fractured under the pressure of financial crisis, deindustrialization, rising economic inequality, and growing distrust of elites. Donald Trump's rise reflects this deeper crisis in the American political order and raises the question of whether the United States is moving beyond neoliberalism toward a new and still uncertain political future. Joining us today to discuss political orders in United States history and the question of if Trump and MAGAism represent the end of the neoliberal order is Gary Gerstle, the Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, and the Klug Chair of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress. Gary Gerstle is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than 10 books, including The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, American Crucible, Liberty and Coercion, and The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. He is currently working on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty First Century. Gary Gersel, welcome to the podcast.

Gary Gerstle 2:34

It's good to be here, Ben.

Ben Zdencanovic 2:36

So a recurring theme in your scholarship and one that has been really highly influential in the field of US history is this concept of political orders. Could you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that term in your scholarship? For instance, how might we understand the New Deal as not just a sort of bundle of policies that was uh instituted by the FDR administration in the 1930s, but rather as an enduring political order that has lasted over uh that lasted for many decades in the 20th century.

Gary Gerstle 3:11

Well, the concept of political order was something that a collaborator of mine, Steve Fraser, and I introduced a long time ago in 1989 in a book called The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, which has had a good run and has been influential. And what we were looking for was a way of understanding politics, political developments that could not be understood within the space of two, four, and six-year electoral cycles. There are reasons why elections are so privileged in the history of politics. They decide important issues, they are performative, it's a way in which Americans experience democracy. But so much effort goes into understanding elections that it leads to a neglect of developments that can't be understood within two and four and six-year intervals. And the concept of political order was we introduced as a way of thinking about longer-term developments that shape politics in powerful and enduring ways. And a political order, as we defined it, was a series of constituencies, think tanks, policies, ideologies, vision of a good life that became so powerful and so uh so dominant that they compelled the opposition party in America to abide by its terms. The New Deal is well known. It's famous for all the reforms of the 1930s. Roosevelt is everywhere regarded as one of the most important American presidents. We were less interested in the New Deal reforms per se than in their enduring importance and in the dominance that the Democratic Party achieved as a result of the New Deal era. And by dominance, I mean not just Roosevelt's ability to win four elections, something that no other president has done, and no one no other president should be able to do by law and the Constitution. We'll see if if that we'll see if that view prevails. We also were interested in what happened after Roosevelt's time was up, what happened when Truman's time was up, what happened when Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952, the first Republican to achieve the White House in 20 years. All this reform from the Republican point of view had been quite radical. Highly progressive taxations, a huge welfare state, shifting power from capital to labor and putting the government behind a project of disciplining capital in the public interest. You would think that when Eisenhower came into power and the Republicans get their chance after 20 years of being out of office, that they would seize this moment to roll back everything that the New Deal had achieved. And that's not what Eisenhower does. Uh he maintains a welfare state, he rolls back labor rights in a few areas, but maintains the heart and soul uh of the labor movement, which is the Wagner Act. One really interesting moment in Eisenhower's early in Eisenhower's presidency, uh tax rates in World War II had had gone up to the point where those on the highest taxation uh rate were expected to pay somewhere between 91 and 94 percent of their income. And one of the key questions was would Eisenhower roll that back or would he keep it? And the expectation, if you were just thinking uh about what the Republicans want, would have been to roll that back and roll it back severely. When I when Eisenhower undertakes to revise the tax code, that's not what he does. He he preserves the progressivity at that taxation rate at those highly elevated progressive levels at the top of the income scale. And when you see a Republican endorsing that level of progressivity, you begin to realize that the dominance of the Democratic Party may have temporarily stopped, but the dominance of their policies continue. And that is the moment when the New Deal movement becomes a New Deal order, when you compel the opposition party to play on your terms.

Ben Zdencanovic 7:33

Right. When the uh the the uh ideals, um uh beliefs, uh policies of uh of the order kind of become hegemonic in a way. They they become common sense and adopted and sort of by part by across partisan lines, in other words.

Gary Gerstle 7:51

It's what you have to do. The the way in which Eisenhower understood this, it's not like he loved welfare or loved labor's power under this regime, but he was expressing a view, and he says this occasionally explicitly, uh, this is something he has to do to remain politically relevant. I think he even writes a letter to his brother at one point and says, you know, in my heart of hearts, I'd love to get rid of social security, old age pension. But if I did that, I would I would be rendered a failed a failed political prospect and the Republican Party would be shunted to the margins.

Ben Zdencanovic 8:25

So the idea of social security as the third rail of politics, that's that's really indicative of that, of that, uh, of that New Deal order then. Absolutely. Absolutely. So and you've argued that the New Deal order eventually in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, gave way to what you called a neoliberal order. So uh why don't you tell our listeners what what do you mean by that? Uh what's the how how did uh a New Deal order give way to a new uh neoliberal order? And how in the neoliberal order were we also seeing that kind of um uh bipartisan consensus around a set of ideals and policies?

Gary Gerstle 9:03

And Steve Fraser and my conception of political order, at the center of it is a principle of political economy that governs a lot of politics. And that principle under the New Deal order was that the government representing the people had to discipline capital in the public interest. The core principle of the neoliberal order is just the reverse of that. Uh, government regulation doesn't work, it's styming growth. The core principle of the neoliberal order was to free capitalism from constraints, let the animal spirits soar, let markets allocate capital labor because they do it most efficiently. This will bring America and the rest of the world the greatest possible growth. This is at the heart of Ronald Reagan's project. It's at the heart of Reaganism. These ideas have been around for a long time. The so-called neoliberals who believe in market fundamentalism, that the economy should be operated according to principles of free markets and in terms of how they work. Uh people like Milton Freeman, Friedrich Friedrich Hayek, they had been spouting this since the 1940s, but in the 50s and 60s, they are, or the early 60s, they are voices in the wilderness. And because the New Deal is so hegemonic, their ideas are shifted to the extremes, to the margins, they don't matter. A political order collapses during a moment of economic crisis where the tools that the reigning political order was using no longer work. And there are fissures in the Democratic Party arising from non-economic matters, particularly race, civil rights movement in the in the 60s, and also the war in Vietnam, which becomes very divisive in the Democratic Party's ranks. And this these begin to pull the constituencies of a coherent Democratic Party apart. But the decisive blow is delivered by the recession of 1973.

Ben Zdencanovic 11:09

In the Bretton Woods, that that that sort of that moment, right?

Gary Gerstle 11:12

That moment, uh, which is also the Yom Kippur War, uh, when uh when the United States goes to support Israel, which has been attacked by its Arab neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the other countries that are supplying a lot of the oil and have organized themselves into into a cartel, they threaten the global north with with this that if if this support continues for Israel, we will suspend oil shipments.

Ben Zdencanovic 11:39

So that's really that's that's where uh you really see that pivot point between the older New Deal order and the beginning of something you know, something new.

Gary Gerstle 11:49

The 1970s is crucial and the Yom Kippur War is a is a trigger. It's not just that alone, but there are two transformations in the global economy that happened in the 1970s, which make the toolkit of the New Deal order, the Keynesian toolkit, not very usable anymore. One is that commodity uh producers, the producers of raw materials like oil, most of them located in the global south, they begin to assert control over their own resources and they begin to say northern corporations, northern governments are not going to dictate to us the prices of the materials that we're going to sell you. The price of oil in the United States quadruples literally overnight, and your average American car is getting somewhere between 10 to 12 miles to the gallon, and so people feel this hardship very acutely. So this is a global phenomenon. It's not just oil, it's a rethinking and a rearrangement of relations between the global south and the global north. This is also the moment where a project of the U.S. government to rebuild the economies of the destroyed nations of World War II, particularly Japan and Germany, begin to yield results. Now, the U.S. wanted these to be strong economies because for the output of American factories, you needed foreign markets. And if you're going to have foreign markets, you need consumers in those foreign markets, and they have to be able to buy your goods. So the U.S. is very deliberately rebuilding these economies. Which in turn become competition. Competition in the 1970s is when you have the first arrival of uh German and Japanese cars in massive numbers on American shores. There's competition in steel, there's competition in electronics. There's a kind of competition that the U.S. uh private sector has forgotten about because they haven't had it for a generation. And uh, you know, and economies don't run efficiently for long on a monopoly basis because monopolies get too comfortable with their control of markets and they become slow to innovate and they become uh uh outcompeted by younger, hungrier rivals, and this is precisely what's happening in the 1970s. So the U.S. economy is battered both by the radical leap in commodity prices for for an economy that are dependent on cheap oil, and it's also severely rattled by competition in major manufacturing industries.

Ben Zdencanovic 14:13

So take us from there through the 1980s and 1990s, because we usually think of uh sort of free market rhetoric, uh anti-statism uh as you know, the sort of pro-business, anti-taxation, that moment is really is really coming out of the Reagan administration. But of course, Clinton uh really picks that up himself in the 1990s, that neoliberal logic, which it seems to me is is also very indicative of this idea of the political order that becomes common sense, it becomes bipartisan. So uh can you walk us through that, the uh 80s, 90s, how how the neoliberal uh logic really becomes kind of solidified?

Gary Gerstle 14:58

Well, the first point to make is that the these neoliberal policies of freeing the market from regulation, getting uh introducing competition into the United States and a whole sort of industries as a way of getting America to compete again, both nationally and internationally. And the key word of the Reagan administration becomes deregulation. Get the government out of the business of regulating the private economy. He's been spouting this for 20 years, and he was governor of California, but uh he is not a viable national candidate until the 1970s. He is the architect of these policies, and he puts many in place in the 1980s, but it's still a partisan project. And the key question is what's going to happen to this project when the Democrats come into power and Clinton in 1992 wins an election? It's not 20 years since like Eisenhower, but it's 12 years, which might as well be an eternity in electoral politics anywhere in the world. And the big question is, is Clinton going to support the Reagan effort at deregulation? Or is he got to try and roll it back and bring back the New Deal and the toolkit of the New Deal, focusing on the government disciplining capital and the public interest? And the story that I tell in my book is that he becomes a deregulator. He supports and endorses and passes a critical um bill on telecommunications, which frees the new IT sector from virtually every form of regulation. This is this is done deliberately. It would be foolish for the government to regulate because we don't know what this revolutionary force is going to yield. So let's let 100 flowers bloom and let's get the government completely out of the way. And in the process, he undermines what had been a vigorous tradition of uh America regulating media outlets that are deemed to be too important to be left in the private sector. So they become utilities, whether it's the phone company or whether it's television or whether it's radio. The United States established a robust uh scheme of regulation, again, coming out of the New Deal, and that endures through the 1980s. Reagan gets rid of it. One of the doctrines he gets rid of is the fair use, the the fair play doctrine, which says if one party is going to be given time or one set of views are going to be given time on radio or TV, an equivalent time must be given uh to the opposition party. And this really constrained public discussion of partisan issues in these public media because they felt under some compulsion to be objective. Reagan throws that out, and you would think that Clinton might bring it back. He doesn't bring it back. The IT industry is completely irregular unregulated. He also uh deregulates uh the financial markets. Glass-Steagall had been a critical element of the New Deal in the 1930s and 40s, bringing stability to financial markets. Uh Clinton is a key force in removing that form of regulation and sets the country up for the Wild West of derivatives and all kinds of other financial instruments that are going to bring on the financial crisis of 2008-2009. If you go down the list, you begin to realize that Clinton had done as much deregulating as Reagan had, and perhaps even more deregulation. And I called him at one point the um Democratic Eisenhower, because which has not endeared me to supporters of Clinton, because he plays a role in securing the Democratic Party's support for the innovative and deregulatory economic policies of Reagan and the Republican Party.

Ben Zdencanovic 18:44

And of course, in trade also. He seems to be more of an enthusiastic sort of supporter of some of these.

Gary Gerstle 19:09

I think that's a shrewd observation. I I think Eisenhower is a reluctant supporter, although, although it should be said as the chief commander of World War II armies, that he did believe deeply in his bones that the government could do good things. So it actually mattered in that context that he had that military background because he could see how effective a powerful government force could be. But you're right, he is a reluctant uh adopter of the New Deal, and Clinton is more the enthusiast, and he and Al Gore are alive and uh uh and transfixed by the possibilities of the IT revolution. And they were not wrong to be excited about these possibilities. They had an acute sense that the world was on the cusp of a major, major technological innovation that was going to change all our lives, and they wanted to be part of this process, but they became too eager, and part of what the computer revolution did to a lot of people uh was to make them think that with the kind of knowledge that the IT economy could generate, perfect market knowledge was within the grasp of human beings. This was a change, fundamental change that affected even a lot of pro progressive economists. Uh because the argument, one of the arguments for government regulation earlier had been markets can only operate effectively if they have good information available to them. And if you're training over long distances and it takes a time for information to travel, you're gonna have problems of communication. And the ideology of the 90s was we now have instantaneous, perfect communication available to anyone in the world at any time of the day and night. Market perfection is now possible. Government intrusion into markets is there. May have there may have been a reason for it at one time, but there no longer is. And if you put yourself in that mindset, okay, it's a different world. Right. It's a third industrial revolution. It's not really an industrial revolution, but it's a third technological revolution. The the steam engine, the the uh the car engine, and now it of the 1990s, you think you're entering a new world and you want to you want America to be the great beneficiary of all these innovations. And so market perfection is something that democratic economists become to believe as as as much as Republican economists.

Ben Zdencanovic 21:35

Well, take us through a little bit more, more to the the more recent past, which is the the subject of your more recent work. Um so uh take us through to the the first Trump term in in uh in uh beginning in 2016, uh, through the the sort of Biden interregnum and uh and and into the our our present with the second Trump um uh Uh uh administration. Do you think that we're seeing the unraveling of the neoliberal order right now? Is is uh are are those neoliberal logics starting to uh uh transform into something else? Are we seeing a shift right now away from what you were just describing with uh uh uh with what was going on in the 90s, 2000s?

Gary Gerstle 22:22

Yes. Uh it's important to distinguish between neoliberal policies and neoliberal order. When I invoke the term neoliberal order, it's meant to convey a set of policies that are hegemonic, as the useful term that you introduced earlier, that control all the parties who want to participate in a political discussion and it achieve political success. And these policies are hegemonic through the financial crisis of 2008-2009. There's a certain theme coming up here of economic crisis breaking up political orders. There was the Great Depression of the 1930s, which broke up a Republican ascendancy and facilitated the New Deal Order. There's the economic recession of the 70s that ends the New Deal order and allows the neoliberal order to take shape. And the 2008-2009 financial crash, which I think still remains the most important event of the 21st century, robs the neoliberal order of its heminy and its ability to order the politics of everyone who's playing on the political terrain. The selling point of neoliberalism was yes, freeing capitalism from constraints was good at increasing inequality between rich and poor, but that wouldn't matter very much because all boats would rise. The poor would be increasing their share of national wealth slower than the rich, but they would be focused not on their share, but on the actual amount they had in their hands. Everybody would feel more prosperous and the whole world would be experiencing this. And the 2008-2009 financial crash gives a lie to that because not all people are prospering. And then the recovery under Obama from the crash privileges the very people who brought on the crash, the bankers, and also it deepens the divide between the haves and the have-nots. If you had assets in the stock market in 2008, 2009, you had achieved your earlier asset level by 2011, 2012 at the latest. If you did not have assets in the stock market, you were still struggling to recoup the lost wages in 2018, 2019, a full 10 years after that crash has happened. And people are aware of that. And it unleashes what I call populist furies on the left and the right, and it makes the 2016 election one of the most consequential of the last 50 years. And the two key players are Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. And as different as those two people are, they share certain fundamental beliefs, the most important, one of which is that a world of free trade, free movement of people, free movement of capital, this is the heart of neoliberalism, is not benefiting enough Americans to continue with those policies. And you see the introduction of policies that were anathema to the neoliberal order. Uh used to be that if you uh called for restrictions on free trade, you were called a protectionist, and that was the death knell of your political career. Uh Sanders and Trump are both protectionists. Both are talking about restrictions on the free movement of people because they're concerned about the influx of so many wage labors that it's depressing the wages of American workers. Uh Sanders is not enamored of the free movement of capital. They begin to think very differently and they put the issue of inequality front and center, and they begin to argue what does America need, and their political projects end up being very, very different. But this is an example of what happens when a political order breaks up and when certain ideas are no longer hegemonic, ideas that have been on the margins, that have been considered heterodox, even dangerous, have their chance to flow to the center and begin to reorganize political life. Now, this is not to say that all neoliberal policies have disappeared from the world. The banks that that built the neoliberal world are have as much power, arguably even more power than they did then. There are elements of the Trump administration that are deeply deregulatory, none more so than what's happened with AI and other policies pertinent to Silicon Valley.

Ben Zdencanovic 26:42

And of course you have Musk and the that sort of doge moment early in 2025 where he was literally dismantling um government agencies and reducing the federal workforce, which seems to me to be quite in line with uh with older neoliberal logic.

Gary Gerstle 26:59

Yes, yes. And on the other hand, you have Trump uh invading the what was considered the inviolable space of private corporations. Nvidia, you want to do business in China, you've got to sell us a 10% share of your business. Now, this in the Trump administration is all a matter of private deals. You've got to satisfy the Lord, you've got to satisfy the king, you've got to give him what you've got to give him something, not just America something, you've got to give him something. And uh this but if you begin to tat up all the instances in where tr in which Trump is invading what had been regarded as an inviolable realm of private corporate prerogatives, this begins to look like a form of state capitalism, which is profoundly hostile to um the neoliberal principles. And it's interesting in this regard that Trump introduces tariffs. Does Biden get rid of the tariffs? He softens some of them, but he keeps them. And then we have the intense tariff regime. If a Democratic president comes into office, he or she will modify the tariff regime and make it more logical, but but won't get rid of it. And the Biden administration was very interested in violating the private corporate space and telling this is one reason why the Silicon Valley went so heavily for Trump because uh because Biden was imposing on them a regime of regulation. And even now the Trump administration is beginning to try to impose some kind of regulation on the development of AI. So what we're seeing is uh much more willingness on the part of the government to intervene with the private practices and policies of capital in America. And this signifies to me that we are no longer in a world that can be characterized as that of the neoliberal order. What the new order would be is not yet determined.

Ben Zdencanovic 29:06

So you you have suggested that we might be seeing the very beginnings of what we might call a MAGA order, um, or or at least that um uh over the past uh uh in Trump's first and second terms, where we we have what we might call a new political order, a MAGA order. Um do you think that that could you say a little bit more about that and how you see uh what what prospects you see of a MAGA order surviving past the sort of cult of personality of Trump himself?

Gary Gerstle 29:41

Well, part of what's interesting about the difference between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 is that he's got a team in place that is systematically pursuing certain ends. Uh a lot of this is laid out in Project 2025, which was a comprehensive and bold and ambitious effort on the part of American conservatives to imagine what a MAGA political order would look like. And when Trump first took office in 2017, he had no idea what he was doing. He he had you know, his corporation was worth a lot, but it was a closely held corporation with an incredibly small number of regular employees, and suddenly he's in charge of this vast government, he has no idea what to do, he's got no real political experience. He fumbles around a lot. In some ways, the best thing that can happen to a presidential aspirant is that they serve a term, they don't know what they're doing, then they have four years to think about everything they didn't do and to begin to plan systematically. And the shock and awe of the first six months of the Trump administration, uh just attacking uh principles, agencies, all kinds of things they didn't like to try and establish uh a uh MAGA political order, viewed not in partisan terms, let me put partisanship aside, but just in the rollout of a political project was incredibly impressive. And the comprehensiveness, the intensity of this attack, it's not just Doge, it's it's immigration, uh, you know, cutting off all immigration to the U.S., which is profoundly anti-neoliberal. Uh this is a this is a powerful part of it. It's the intensity of the tariff regime, uh and Trump calling it Liberation Day, April 1st, 2025. Uh very systematic, uh a staff in place, systematically going after different institutions of both the government and civil society. Uh Doge symbolizes going after aspects of the government, the attack on universities and science symbolizes an effort to take these very powerful sectors of American civil society that have beyond been beyond MAGA and Republican control, and to bring them under that control. So we definitely see a the elements of a political order taking shape. We see the heavily involved heavy involvement of think tanks, the elaboration of policies across a broad front. These are people with a grand vision of what they want to do. Now, will they succeed? As to your question, beyond the Trump cult. Um not in the conventional sense, a conventional sense defined by what happened in the New Deal and what happened under Reagan and neoliberalism in the 1980s. There's a really compelling similarity between uh the Roosevelt years and the Reagan years. Both of them have heartily contested elections the first time around. The second time, they win by overwhelming numbers. Uh Roosevelt in 1936 gets more than 60% of the popular vote, more than 90% of the electoral vote. So those are unimaginable numbers in America today. Reagan does something similar, over 60% of the popular vote in 1984 against poor Walter Mondale, and over 90% of the electoral college. And it's that kind of overwhelming victory that begins to compel the opposition to think we're in serious trouble. We need to reconsider our policies on certain issues and begin to modify them so that we can steal some of this electorate back. Yeah. And what they did in the process was to dramatically enlarge their base of popular support, which could then give them a claim that they deserved to be hegemonic because that's what the American people wanted. What's so striking about the Trump administration is that he's done nothing of the sort. And even though he made substantial increases in the base of his support in the 2024 election, most strikingly among young men of color, blacks and Latinos, he really increased his portion of those votes. I mean, the numbers voting for uh Trump and the Bronx of New York City, heavily Latino section, are just extraordinary. So he had the basis for beginning to build out a broader coalition that would give either him or his successor in 2028, let's say J.D. Vance, the ability to execute a Roosevelt 36 or Reagan 1984 election. And once that happens, the opposition says, oh my God, we're in trouble. We have we need to adapt. He's done nothing of the sort. He's he's tacked always to the right. He's he's he's addressing everything to his core base of 30, 35 percent of the people. And this means that if he succeeds in establishing or his successors succeed in establishing a political order, it would not be done on the consensual basis achieved by Roosevelt and Reagan. It will be done in the manner of the model put forward by Viktor Orban in Hungary, where you don't try and increase your base, you judge elections remain important, but you try and uh you you try and jigger elections so that your party is not going to lose, and you try and control the courts so that if there are any disputes about the elections, they go before judges who are favorable to you. And so and and this connection to Orban uh is not just imaginary because the international movement of MAGA is looks to Orban and looks to like-minded people elsewhere. Putin, Erdogan, Modi. There are a lot of these authoritarian people.

Ben Zdencanovic 35:34

Yeah, the right-wing populism is very much a sort of transnational movement. Yes.

Gary Gerstle 35:39

And Orban always set aside a lot of money in a not very wealthy country to propagandize abroad. And he came to the CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which meets every year, which is one of the beating hearts of MAGA, and he says, Why don't you hold your convention in Hungary? We have things to share. And they did that. They've done they've done that more than once. And so there are these deep connections between what Orban did in Hungary and what Reagan's key supporters and staff want to do in the United States. And so if he succeeds in uh building a political order, it will be a political order built on coercion rather than consensus, and thus it'll be an authoritarian political order rather than a democratic one. Now, Orban's defeat recently may put a crimp in that plan, but the I'm sure the staffers of the Trump MAGA movement are saying, well, he made mistakes. We won't make them. We'll secure our ascendancy in this way.

Ben Zdencanovic 36:38

Well, that that brings me to my my final question for you, uh, Gary, which is uh to end on more uh a more positive note. Um what are some alternatives to this, right? Because your forthcoming book is subtitled Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the 21st Century. So we've talked a lot about the peril side, right? The uh the collapse of neoliberalism, uh the rise of right-wing populism, the possibility of a MAGA order. Um but where, in your view, does the democratic hope lie? Uh what are maybe some political forces or conditions or ideas uh that might form the basis of a genuinely democratic post-neoliberal order?

Gary Gerstle 37:22

Well, I have several things to say about that. First, uh the Biden administration, which I don't think of as a Biden administration, I think of it as a Biden um Bernie Sanders administration because the policies of that administration charted out for Americans what a progressive political order would look like. And across a very broad front, um there was an effort to discipline capital in the public interest, to diminish inequality between the the rich and poor, too.

Ben Zdencanovic 37:51

Industrial policy of the kind that would have been unimaginable in the in the 90s, right?

Gary Gerstle 37:55

Yes. Uh an unimaginable industrial policy. Talk about uh a surplus tax on the billionaires. Actually, not the billionaires, it's the billionaires who have more than 100 billion, that kind of that that kind of surtax. Uh uh breaking up monopolies of of corporations, putting high-tech under a kind of regulation that they had never been subjected to before. Uh the part of the story I'm telling in my book is why this grand plan failed to catch fire, and that's too complicated a story to go into now. But there are other alternatives out there, and it should need to be said, too, that the resistance to Trump has been strong. Whether you look at the No King's marches or the Supreme Court has not been a uh uh bastion of defense against Trump. But if you look at the federal district court judges and their rulings against all the things that Trump has been doing through executive orders that are more properly handled by Congress, it gives you a sense for the vigor and depth of American democracy. This is not Weimar, and this is not the United States is not Weimar with a democracy that's 14 years old before Hitler takes it apart. It's not Hungary, which has much less of a history of democracy in its own land. It's this is a country that's had a democracy and a single operating under a single constitution for 230 years, and there's a depth to the practices of democracy that will make this country more resilient than some of those other places. Uh however, the democracy in America is under severe assault. And it may be that depending on the outcome of the midterms and the elections of 2028, uh, it may be that if MAGA wins enough important victories, or if they manage to steal elections or render elections unfree and unfair, that they will ex they will succeed in organizing America, and America will effectively have lost its democracy. And if that happens, it's going to have to struggle to get it back. And I have found myself reading about other countries. This is not a story that Americans like to hear about, but it's a necessary story. There's there are uh histories of other countries that have lost their democracy and have struggled to get it back and have done so successfully. And we will may we we will have things to learn from them. I do believe that the democratic instinct is irrepressible. I do believe that the instinct to be self-governing is irrepressible so that if it's repressed in a set of circumstances, it will not be repressed forever and it will come back. And whether you look at democracy in Germany or the recovery of democracy in Spain, or the recovery of democracy in Chile, or the recovery of democracy in Argentina, Brazil, there are countries, the world is full of countries that have lost their democracy and have had to struggle to get it back. And we may be engaged in such a struggle, and it may define the struggle of the next generation. There are hopeful signs. The recent losses of elections on the on the part of Republican, Republicans that Trump has supported in general elections, there's deep unhappiness with with Trump now. I do believe that if the 2026 election is free and fair, that Democrats will triumph and control at least one one house of Congress. I think the civil resistance demonstrated by the people of Minneapolis, one of the glorious chapters in standing up for individual rights and democracy and in this century and other centuries, my my hat goes off to those brave people. And that kind of civil society uprising will be repeated in other places if the Trump administration deploys the kind of illegitimate power. And I'm speaking not just about immigration, but on other matters as well that it deployed in Minneapolis. So the sources of resistance in civil society will be strong. I also take hope from Mamdani's election in New York City, not that the socialism of New York City is exportable to other parts of the country, but there's a learning curve there about what Democrats have to do to be elected. And if you if you think he has views on a whole series of cultural issues, Palestine, identity politics of the Democratic Party, on race, on gender, on sexuality. But if you look what he foregrounded in his campaign, it was all on questions of affordability, which transcends cultural divisions. So he offers us a model of how one can stay true to one's cultural beliefs and still develop a what I would call a left populist program that can begin to build the kind of coalition that progressives will have to build if they are going to be successful in America in the future. So that is another source of hope. And to anyone listening to this program, keep hope alive.

Ben Zdencanovic 43:06

Great. A good place to end it. Thank you so much, Gary, for joining us.

Gary Gerstle 43:10

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Ben Zdencanovic 43:12

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Narrator 43:44

Thank you for listening to the History Politics Podcast. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, left and center at history.com.com. Our show is produced by Roselyn Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support. And thanks to you for listening.