Left behind how neoliberalism's legacy cost Democrats the 2024 election.

We just elected a guy who's fine with the planet melting down, kids getting shot in school,

insurance companies going back to denying coverage for preexisting conditions,

and it wants to weaponize the federal government in a way dictators do. What happened?

Democrats thought the 2024 election would be all about Donald Trump's embrace of fascism and the

future of our democracy and abortion. Pretty much all of us thought that, as did most of the news media

and the pundits. But now that exopoles and research is largely in,

we're finding instead that the election was all about who'd be best able to blow up the system.

By the system, voters didn't mean democracy, although we may get the end of that. They meant the

neoliberal system that Ronald Reagan introduced to replace FDR's New Deal

policies in 1981 and was subsequently embraced by Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

If that word intimidates or confuses you, as it does most Americans, here it is broken down.

Neoliberalism, as I lay out in the hidden history of neoliberalism, how Reaganism gutted America,

combines free trade, low taxes, and an end to the power of unions.

Neoliberals typically also embrace open borders, as in the world's most complete neoliberal experiment

that's called the European Union, which is also in trouble now.

The result of Reagan's version of neoliberalism

has been that good jobs, over 20 million of them, and even entire factories, over 15,000 of them,

moved to low-wage countries. Unions were destroyed, and wealth exploded at the top, while the

middle class shrank into near poverty.

In the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were the first two major candidates for either of the two major parties to call for an end to neoliberalism.

Americans were enchanted by both.

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