From Reagan to Trump: Neoliberalism, Class War, and American Decadence
Rev Left Radio
Breht O'Shea
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2025
⏱️ 116 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, public school history teacher Gianni Paul joins Breht to trace the historical roots of our current crisis — stagnant wages, mass homelessness, collapsing infrastructure, rising fascism, Gilded Age inequality, and a beaten down working class — back to Reagan's counter-revolution against the New Deal and the forty-year neoliberal project that followed. Together, they explore how neoliberalism emerged out of the crises of the 1970s, Carter's role in laying the groundwork before Reagan, the destruction of unions and working-class power, the ideological weaponization of anti-communism, the bipartisan consolidation of neoliberalism under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, the ways Reagan and Trump represent two phases of the same class project, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of capitalist triumphalism, the slow disintegration of America's middle class into debt and precarity, the explosion of homelessness and hopelessness, the erosion of U.S. imperial dominance alongside the emergence of a multipolar world, and why the U.S. repeatedly chooses reaction over social transformation — raising the question of whether genuine change can still emerge from within the imperial core or whether new possibilities are taking shape elsewhere. Understanding this history is key to understanding why everyday life in America feels increasingly unstable, and what futures remain possible beyond neoliberal decay.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode we have my friend |
| 0:10.4 | Gianni from the people's classroom on to talk about Reagan, the rise of neoliberalism, the |
| 0:18.6 | last 40 plus years of what we call the neoliberal era, how it was a capitalist |
| 0:23.6 | response to the New Deal and the crises of the 70s, the political coalition that Reagan put together |
| 0:30.5 | to advance the class interests of the capitalist class, and how every president since Reagan is |
| 0:36.8 | just a variation on Reagan. And we also draw |
| 0:39.7 | you know clear parallels, direct parallels between Reagan and his political project and Trump |
| 0:46.0 | and his political project. And the interesting aspect here is we see Reagan at the beginning of |
| 0:51.7 | neoliberalism doing a very similar thing but with differences than Trump at the beginning of neoliberalism doing a very similar thing but with differences |
| 0:55.4 | than Trump at the end of the neoliberal period. |
| 0:59.3 | Not that Trump himself represents a divergence or a rupture from neoliberalism, |
| 1:03.6 | but he actually is a symptom of neoliberal decay and perhaps its last gasp. |
| 1:09.5 | So to draw those direct lines and parallels and kind of oscillate back and forth and show, |
| 1:15.3 | you know, the society we have today was really birthed in the neoliberal era through Reagan |
| 1:21.0 | and that Trump himself can be seen as an interesting, you know, |
| 1:25.5 | version of Reagan at the end of the neoliberal project. |
| 1:29.1 | So this is a fascinating conversation. |
| 1:30.8 | I think it's really crucial to understand this history, to understand that, you know, this is where we are, |
| 1:38.1 | and it's a very clear trajectory. |
| 1:39.4 | But we also go back and cover the Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, the New Deal, the Great |
| 1:45.0 | Depression, World War II, and show how in these periods time and time again of American |
| 1:50.6 | crisis that the ruptural opportunity for a revolutionary shift is there, but it is always |
... |
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