Not sure what value this brings and apologies if this sounds like a nonsensical doomsday spiel, but looking through the causes and consequences, I don’t think neoliberalism does anything positive in the long-term for the health, growth, and wellbeing of a nation-state. This is obvious at this point even just looking purely at the US’s contemporary trajectory . . . but taking the past 20 years altogether gives us a far dire picture of what that means when considering the rejection of neoliberalism across the world, particularly South America.

Neoliberalism, applied with such a fundamentalist style upon education, healthcare, and the erosion of social services with a overemphasis on the free market fixing all issues seems to lay the groundwork for both anti-intellectualism as we’ve seen from ignorant masses who look for quick explanations to blame their troubles on people they see instead of policy decisions by the US government and for monopolistic markets to exploit the larger masses with lies about trickle-down and reasons behind war campaigns.

Crucially, and it’s a surprise nobody rebuffs neoliberalism for this, capitalist markets are far too myopic to focus on ongoing environmental and social issues that are needed to safeguard from cataclysmic environmental disasters. Free markets have to compete and their views, time, resources, and energy are motivated both by monetary gain and by effective measurements to surpass the competition and that’s often in a time-sensitive manner. The use of shock events like environmental disaster to spread neoliberalism implies massive disasters are useful and profitable for these myopic markets. That is blatantly dangerous for a plethora of environmental and human rights reasons. Yet, the myopic views of corporate organizations would be too blind to them.

Republican and Democrat tacit or openly willful support of policies that deregulate, shrink, or destabilize the safety net. Policies that leave large vacancies, and remove government assistance for not just the most at risk, but all individuals representing 90% of the public represents not just short-term narcissism by legislatures or myopia towards campaign contributions but a fundamental disregard for what government means for the people and what it does for the people. We see it clearly with gerrymandering and the criticism of the two-party system by the founders having become incredibly apparent . . . but also the lack of foresight in their thinking that legislatures should have a separateness from majority opinion. Such ideas have positives and negatives but we now see the negatives worsening. The Republican party’s deregulation and policies of economic drift is continuing to be motivated by fundamentalist Christians who feel pleasure and truth from assisting in the deregulatory efforts.

The leadership has similarly thoroughly eroded in solutions and options to complex issues. As we saw when the crop of neoliberal contenders for the Republican base failed to stop the sweeping tide of Trump’s blatantly racist rhetoric and liberals rejected Clinton in favor of Bernie due to policy preferences. The reason Trump won was primarily due to this empty belief in hope – immersed with nationalistic fervor and a yearning for a mythic view of yesteryears – and neoliberalist economic enthusiasts capitalized on it to further push a neoliberal agenda of deregulation mixed with a capricious modus operandi on everything else. Trump is not some masterful threat, that notion is laughable and I can’t regard it with any degree of seriousness, but what his presidency does mean is that anyone with somewhat more intelligence and guile could cause a situation not too far removed from Japanese encampment or even something more murderous and violent like the Holocaust. The fact Trump was successful and has no real policy objectives shows us this and shows that voters can easily be duped into thinking a clown is intelligent. We don’t, as a democratic nation-state, have the will, knowledge, or safeguards to prevent future horrific events. Many would even embrace tyranny… and destroy everything we purportedly stand for.

I feel now that, based on the ongoing wars that continue due to incompetence and the complete failures to formulate an effective foreign policy agenda or long-term plan for places we should have won years back, the dismantling of safety nets for common sense legislation like clean air, and the lack of foresight on what should be considered a principal national interest in environmental policies; what we’re experiencing, and have witnessed with the 20 years of self-damage from the debt, reckless Wall Street greed that came as a consequence of deregulation, and the fracturing of the middle class with the wider society now working 2 jobs just to survive; in conjunction with a decreasing faith in the US government and mainstream media . . . is demonstrable evidence that the end result of neoliberal fundamentalism is the enthusiastic self-annihilation of a nation-state. If a government doesn’t do anything for a people then, notwithstanding threats of violence, there leaves little that will be followed or inspired or even maintained in the long-term. Will the future of the US even be recognizable when compared to its past, if we keep seeing neoliberalist fundamentalism pushing everything in one bleak direction? I doubt it now and the track record is evidence that any turn around may be a small pebble in a vast ocean of bad policy design. The wage gaps, the economic divide between the wealthy and the poor, the rising tide of racial aggression, the massive debt, and the endless wars – all and everything, at it’s core, is due to the belief in the economic policy of neoliberalism.