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Abundance
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Conclusion Summary: “Toward Abundance”
Politics is a way of organizing conflict, so people’s attention goes toward divisions. Beyond divisions, however, is a path toward a new political order. “Political order” is a term American historian Gary Gerstle coined that describes “how hidden points of consensus between the parties create distinctive periods of history” (204). The neoliberal order lasted from the 1970s to the 2010s, which followed the New Deal Order of the 1930s to 1960s that collapsed under the weight of stagflation and the Vietnam War. The New Left challenged the New Deal Left. By the 1970s, individualism ran rampant in the American political sphere. The government became smaller than ever under Bill Clinton, who slashed the federal budget and deregulated the financial and IT sectors.
Presently, the neoliberal order is ending and making space for a new political order. This order, according to Klein and Thompson, may be defined by cynicism and distrust in government. People no longer believe that the life they had been promised is achievable, leading to increasing populism on both the left and right. Klein and Thompson describe the current moment as a shift, where people are searching for a politics that feels relevant.
