CHAPTER 1

Save Us from the Utopians

It may be said that effective and rational economic policies can be implemented only by a superior leader of the philosopher-statesman type under a powerful autocracy.

—F. A. Hayek

Every generation has its believers in utopia, from Plato’s mythical city of Magnesia¹ to Thomas More’s 16th-century island of Utopia² to the “scientific socialism” of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Somehow, none of them worked out: Plato held slaves and was, according to Karl Popper, an early architect of multiple forms of totalitarianism (citing his influence on a particularly brutal form of early Christianity);³ Thomas More supervised the burning alive of six Protestants and tortured a man in More’s own home; Marxism’s victims in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and China (among others) are well-known.

When I lived in Germany in the 1980s, I became close friends with a number of former Nazis, then in their late-middle years, who’d followed Hitler in their youth (most were in their teens when the war ended) because he’d promised to bring the world “a thousand years of peace” and worldwide harmony through National Socialism.⁴

In the early 1980s, my wife, Louise, and I spent a few weeks on a small sailing ship off the coast of Malaysia with Dr. Will Krynen, who’d worked for the Red Cross and treated Pol Pot as he was dying in Cambodia.⁵ Pol Pot had reset the calendar to “Year Zero” in 1975⁶ and overseen the murders of over a million Cambodians whose crime was that they were literate—because he was convinced that people who knew nothing of history were a blank slate on which an entire new, utopian society could be written.

The idea wasn’t unique to Pol Pot.

Borrowing revolutionary fervor from the Jeffersonians, Maximilien Robespierre declared 1793 as Year One of the First French Republic, which he kicked off in September 1792. He even renamed the months of the year in a break with France’s Catholic/Roman calendar past. Mirabeau, Marat, Danton, Robespierre, and other members of the Committee of Public Safety truly believed they could create a paradise on Earth if they just got rid of France’s royal and feudal past, chopped the heads off 1,376 people, and, essentially, started over from scratch.

That idea was so appealing to Russia’s Bolsheviks that in 1918, they too dumped the Julian calendar.⁷ In November of that year, in Alexander’s Garden (now under the walls of the Kremlin), they erected a monument to Robespierre commissioned by Vladimir Lenin himself (another leader who promised utopia).⁸ A road named Quai Robespierre carries the French revolutionary’s memory in Moscow.

Here in America, we were somewhat less extreme in our revolution, although we did evict the British (killing tens of thousands) and began an experiment with republican democracy that had largely lain fallow for several thousand years. In the early years of the George Washington presidency, his Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, put into place what he called the American Plan, which succeeded in producing what was then the world’s greatest explosion of wealth and the first American middle class (more about that later).

Almost 80 years after the American Revolution, the American Civil War could be cast as a battle between two competing utopian ideals: democracy in the North and a slavery-based oligarchy in the South (as I detail at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class). The Confederate revolutionaries lost their quest to remodel all of America after the late-stage slaveholding Roman Republic (although their heirs continue the fight).

The next American revolution came in the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt won his effort to overhaul America’s economic and political system, ending the Republican Great Depression and helping our allies end fascism in Japan, Italy, and Germany (it continued in Spain until the 1970s).

And FDR’s reinvention of America did, indeed and finally, produce widespread prosperity, a massive expansion of democracy, and the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the history of the world to that point.

But every revolution has its counterrevolutionaries; Confederates had attacked the heirs of Washington’s revolution and failed; American oligarchs went after Roosevelt in the early 1930s, even attempting to kidnap or kill him in the so-called Business Plot.

But by the late 1970s, a far deeper and more widespread counterrevolution against FDR’s New Deal had begun to take root, first in the United Kingdom with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher as Great Britain’s prime minister and then in the United States with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as president.

By that time, it wasn’t Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathizers and America Firsters who took on and then largely took down FDR’s Keynesian revolution: it was the American followers of two Austrian economists and an American academic from the University of Chicago who was, on the side, secretly hustling for the real estate industry.

Friedrich August von Hayek (more commonly known as F. A. Hayek), Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and their followers truly believed that FDR’s revolution—and the reconfiguration of economies across Europe using his Keynesian economic model—would end in disaster, something close to the Soviet takeover of Russia or even Hitler’s rise in Germany, and so they launched their own counterrevolution.

To stop the dangers of FDR’s Keynesian economics and its widespread popularity across America and around the world, they said it was vital to privatize government functions, radically cut taxes on rich people and big corporations while imposing “austerity” on everybody else, and eliminate national policies that protected labor (from tariffs to unions) by creating a single global marketplace.

That movement, which they called neoliberalism and which, in America, is sometimes known as Reaganomics or the Third Way (a movement that came out of President Bill Clinton’s neoliberal New Democrat Caucus and that showed up in the UK as Tony Blair’s New Labor), was supposed to set aside the trappings and powers of government to allow the free market to reshape everything from the world economy to each nation’s federal government to the world’s families.

It would, they fervently believed, use the magic of the market to bring widespread prosperity, increase freedom, and ultimately stabilize politics in messy democracies worldwide.

Instead, their neoliberal movement reshaped the American political and economic landscape in ways the neoliberal evangelists failed to initially foresee (but later, particularly in Chile and Russia, embraced), leading to political violence, widespread poverty, massive inequality, and a political backlash that included the election of Donald Trump and led to this era’s crisis of democracy.

Today the neoliberal movement has seized control of much of the developed world and, at the same time, is fighting for its life as the depth and breadth of its disaster is increasingly recognized across the world.

Between the election of America’s first neoliberal president, Ronald Reagan, and 2019, household income going to the top 1 percent of Americans doubled, while the bottom 90 percent saw no meaningful increase in income at all.⁹

CEO pay went up by almost a thousand percent, as the richest 0.1 percent of Americans saw their wealth rise from 10 percent of all the wealth in America in 1980 to over 20 percent by 2020, more than the combined wealth of the entire bottom half of American families, who today own a mere 1.3 percent of this nation’s wealth.¹⁰

Meanwhile, the richest Americans have captured our political system: the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans made over 40 percent of all campaign contributions in 2016, while corporations poured $3.4 billion into the 2016 election after moving more than 60,000 factories overseas.¹¹

Increasingly, Americans are aware of these trends—entirely traceable back to neoliberal policies put into place in the 1980s and holding until 2021—and are pissed off about it.

The result of neoliberalism’s dramatic failure in the United States is that Americans are, once again, on the edge of another generational revolution, both political and economic. Similar movements against neoliberalism are rising across the developed and developing world, some in ways that could be so destabilizing as to lead to a third world war.