The integrated global economy — cheap goods, open supply chains, the American security umbrella — is ending. Gary Gerstle has spent his career explaining how we got here: how Reagan and Thatcher built an order that Clinton and Blair then completed, how that order hollowed out the communities that had once sustained British and American civic life, and why 2016 — Brexit and Trump simultaneously — was the moment the fracture became undeniable. We recorded this conversation with the Strait of Hormuz partially blockaded and oil above $100. Gerstle does not expect the freedom of the seas that underpinned the global economy to come back in his lifetime and perhaps not in ours either. He ends by calling liberty a fragile flower and I think he is right. Watch or listen below.
Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order — one of the most clarifying accounts written of how a set of economic assumptions came to dominate Western politics, and how they are now collapsing. He is currently Kluge Chair of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress, working on his next book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century, forthcoming from Penguin Press.
In this episode we think out loud about:
— What a political order actually is and why the neoliberal one compelled even its opponents to play on its terms
— The New Deal order, Eisenhower, and how political settlements are made to stick
— Brexit as a fracture event— the Singapore dream versus the working-class revolt
— The Iran war and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz — the end of freedom of the seas
— The working class as casualties — and why welfare alone cannot restore what was lost
— Whether what is happening now is a swing of the pendulum or a rupture of a fundamentally different kind
— What Gary Gerstle changed his mind on: Reagan, Obama, and the discipline of historical humility
Find Gary Gerstle’s work:
- The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: https://amzn.to/4u7wWIA9780197519646
- Books: https://amzn.to/3Rp07bG
About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with thinkers, historians, and commentators grappling honestly with the condition of our civilisation.
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