Across the second decade of the 21st century, the tectonic plates structuring American politics and life began to shift. Even before the pandemic struck, developments that 10 years earlier would have seemed inconceivable now dominated politics and popular consciousness: the election — and reelection — of Donald Trump and the launch of a presidency like no other; the rise of Bernie Sanders and the resurrection of a socialist left; the sudden and deep questioning of open borders and free trade; the surge of populism and ethnonationalism and the castigation of once-celebrated globalizing elites; the decline of Barack Obama’s stature and the transformational promise that his presidency once embodied for so many; and the widening conviction that the American political system was no longer working, and that American democracy was in crisis.
In this dizzying array of political developments, I discern the fall — or at least the fracturing — of a political order that took shape in the 1970s and 1980s and achieved dominance in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. I call this political formation a neoliberal order. Ronald Reagan was its ideological architect; Bill Clinton was its key facilitator.
The phrase “political order” is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond election cycles. In the last 100 years, America has had two political orders: the New Deal that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, crested in the 1950s and 1960s, and fell in the 1970s; and the neoliberal order that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, crested in the 1990s and 2000s, and fell in the 2010s.
At the heart of each of these two political orders stood a distinctive program of political economy. The New Deal was founded on the conviction that capitalism left to its own devices spelled economic disaster. It had to be managed by a strong central state able to govern the economic system in the public interest. The neoliberal order, by contrast, was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymieing growth, innovation and freedom. The architects of the neoliberal order set out in the 1980s and 1990s to dismantle everything that the New Deal order had built across its 40-year span. Now it, too, is being dismantled.
Establishing a political order demands far more than winning an election or two. It requires deep-pocketed donors (and political action committees) to invest in promising candidates over the long term; the establishment of think tanks and policy networks to turn political ideas into actionable programs; a rising political party able to consistently win over multiple electoral constituencies; a capacity to shape political opinion both at the highest levels (the Supreme Court) and across legacy and new media; and a moral perspective able to inspire voters with visions of the good life.
Political orders, in other words, are complex projects that require advances across a broad front. New ones do not arise very often; usually they appear when an older order founders amid an economic crisis that then precipitates a governing crisis. “Stagflation” precipitated the fall of the New Deal order in the 1970s; the global financial crash and ensuing recession of 2008-09 triggered the fracturing of the neoliberal order in the 2010s.
In these moments of decline, political ideas and programs formerly regarded as radical, heterodox or unworkable, or dismissed as the product of the overheated imaginations of fringe groups on the right and left, are able to move from the margins into the mainstream. This happened in the 1970s, when the breakup of the New Deal order allowed long-scorned neoliberal ideas for reorganizing the economy to take root; it happened again in the 2010s when the coming apart of the neoliberal order opened up space for Trump-style populism and Sanders-style socialism to flourish.
Conservative and liberal
In the United States, conservatism has long been the preferred term to frame the political developments that describe what I refer to as neoliberalism. Why, then, label the political order that dominated America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries a neoliberal one rather than a conservative one? That choice deserves some explanation.
Conservatism, in the classical sense, signifies respect for tradition, deference to existing institutions and the hierarchies that structure them, and suspicion of change. One can find manifestations of these ideas in American politics across the second half of the 20th century, most importantly in a widespread determination among white Southerners to maintain racial privilege in the era of civil rights and among Americans throughout the country who, in the name of tradition, were pushing back against liberation movements calling for equal rights for women and gay people, and for sexual freedom.
Other beliefs commonly associated with conservatism in America, however, do not fit comfortably under this political label. A celebration of free market capitalism, entrepreneurialism and economic risk-taking was central to Republican Party politics of the late 20th century. Yet this politics was not about maintaining tradition or the institutions that buttressed it; rather, it was about disrupting traditions and upending institutions that stood in the way.
Neoliberalism calls explicitly for unleashing capitalism’s power. Central to the politics of the Clinton years were major legislative packages that fundamentally restructured America’s information/communication and financial systems and whose influence on the 21st-century political economy has been decisive.
And yet those restructurings have attracted less attention than they deserve, their significance hidden by the smoke generated by the decade’s fiery culture wars. Those culture wars cannot be ignored any more than the racial backlash against the Civil Rights Movement can be slighted. But it is time to bring the project of economic transformation more into focus, to give it the kind of careful examination it deserves, and to adjust our views of late 20th-century America accordingly.
The neoliberal order was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymieing growth, innovation and freedom. The architects of the neoliberal order set out to dismantle everything that the New Deal order had built across its 40-year span. Now it, too, is being dismantled.
Neoliberalism prizes free trade, celebrates deregulation as an economic good and valorizes cosmopolitanism as a cultural achievement, the product of open borders and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse peoples. It hails globalization as a win-win position that both enriches the West (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. These creedal principles deeply shaped American politics during the heyday of the neoliberal order.
Neoliberalism, then, sought to infuse political economy with the principles of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism (born in the 18th century) discerned in markets extraordinary dynamism and possibilities for generating trade, wealth and a rising standard of living. It sought to liberate markets from monarchy, mercantilism, bureaucracy, artificial borders and tariffs. It sought, in other words, to release the economy from the heavy hand of the state in its various guises. It wanted to allow people to move around in pursuit of self-interest and fortune. Classical liberalism wanted to let individual talent rise (or fall) to its natural level. It carried within it emancipatory, even utopian, hopes of people freed and a world transformed.
Every student of neoliberalism must pay careful attention to its harsh elements, including mechanisms of coercion used to impose market discipline on a society; support, sometimes ruthless, for pursuing capitalist accumulation; and an indifference to questions of economic equality and redistribution.
But an elite-driven model for understanding neoliberalism cannot suffice to account for the popularity that its views achieved in the United States. Reagan convinced many Americans that joining his political crusade would unshackle the economy from regulation and make them free. He framed that freedom as every American’s birthright; the pursuit of that freedom, he argued, was the reason the American Revolution had been fought, the reason the American nation had come into existence. Reagan resuscitated the emancipatory language of classical liberalism for a late 20th-century audience, an act of recovery that helped to make him one of America’s most popular political figures.
Competing moral perspectives
The international origins and reach of neoliberalism have been well documented by a variety of scholars. Generally missing from those studies, however, is a reckoning with the Soviet Union and of communism more generally. Few international events in the 20th century matched the Russian Revolution of 1917 in importance. In the 50 years after their rise to power in Russia, communists walled off large parts of the world — the vast Soviet Union itself, then half of Europe, and then China — from capitalist economics.
For the first third of the Cold War era, communism was a serious threat in western Europe; for the first two thirds of the Cold War, it posed a similar threat across innumerable nations emerging in Africa and Asia, and across Latin America. Fascism and Nazism can be understood as radical right responses to communism’s rise. Meanwhile, in the United States, from the 1920s forward, communism was regarded as a mortal threat to the American way of life. The Great Depression and the Second World War moderated America’s anticommunism, temporarily. No other single political force had a comparable influence on the world or American politics across the 20th century.
The power of — and the fear unleashed by — the communist threat is now largely forgotten. But the consequences of the Soviet Union’s fall between 1989 and 1991 and the simultaneous defeat of its legitimating ideology were immense, making possible neoliberalism’s American and global triumph.
One consequence of communism’s fall is obvious: It opened a large part of the world — Russia and Eastern Europe — to capitalist penetration. It also dramatically widened the willingness of China (still nominally a communist state) to experiment with capitalist economics. Capitalism thus became global in the 1990s in a way it had not been since prior to the First World War.
Another consequence of communism’s fall may be less obvious but is of equal importance: It removed what had been an imperative in America (and in Europe and elsewhere) for compromise between capitalist elites and the working classes. From the 1930s through the 1960s, communism was understood through the lens of totalitarianism. A nation once lost to communism would never be regained for the capitalist world (or so the influential theory of totalitarianism taught). Thus the specter of communist advance required a policy of military containment unprecedented in American history. The fear of communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order, and similar agreements in many social democracies in Europe after World War II.
In these moments of decline, political ideas and programs formerly regarded as radical, heterodox, or unworkable move from the margins into the mainstream.
The precise timing of the fall of the Soviet Union and of communism more generally — 1989-1991 — explains why the 1990s was a more decisive decade in neoliberalism’s triumph than the 1980s had been, and why Clinton’s role in securing neoliberalism’s triumph was in some ways more important than that of Reagan himself. After 1991, the pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class vanished. The room for political maneuver by class-based progressive forces narrowed dramatically. This was the moment when neoliberalism transitioned from a political movement to a political order.
Every political order contains ideological contradictions and conflicts among constituencies that it must manage; the neoliberal order was no exception in that regard. One such contradiction has already been noted: that which existed between those who saw neoliberalism as a strategy for enhancing rule by elites and those who saw in it a pathway toward personal emancipation.
Another lay in the uneasy coexistence within the neoliberal order of two strikingly different moral perspectives on how to achieve the good life. One, which I label neo-Victorian, celebrated self-reliance, strong families and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality and consumption. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family — heterosexual and led by male patriarchs. Such families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in their members and especially in the young, and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. This view found a mass base in Jerry Falwell’s legions of evangelical Christians, mobilized politically as part of an influential religious organization known as the Moral Majority.
The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order, which I label cosmopolitan, saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance and prescribed social roles. In the United States, this moral perspective drew energy from the liberation movements originating in the New Left of the 1960s and flourished in the era of the neoliberal order. Cosmopolitanism rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living.
The existence of two such different moral perspectives was both a strength and a weakness for the neoliberal order. The strength lay in the order’s ability to accommodate within a common program of political economy very different constituencies with radically divergent perspectives on moral life. The weakness lay in the fact that the cultural battles between these two constituencies might threaten to erode the hegemony of neoliberal economic principles.
The cosmopolitans attacked neo-Victorians for discriminating against gay people, feminists and immigrants, and for stigmatizing lower-income Black people for their “culture of poverty.” The neo-Victorians attacked the cosmopolitans for tolerating virtually any lifestyle, for excusing deplorable behavior as an exercise in the toleration of difference and for showing a higher regard for foreign cultures than for America’s own. The decade of the neoliberal order’s triumph — the 1990s — was also one in which cosmopolitans and neo-Victorians fought each other in a series of battles that became known as the “culture wars.” In fact, a focus on these cultural divisions is the preferred way of writing the political history of these years. Many political scientists regard “polarization” as the key phenomenon in American politics and devote themselves to explaining how it arose and how it has shaped — or rather misshaped — American society.
If the government could shape markets via tariffs and immigration restriction, might there be other ways in which the state could exercise authority over the economy? If social media companies could be regulated or broken up, what about other corporations that had accumulated too much power?
I do not deny the reality of this polarization, which, ultimately, would contribute to the fracturing of the neoliberal order. But this reality should not be allowed to obscure the coexistence of cultural polarization with a broad agreement on principles of political economy. This paradoxical coexistence of cultural division and political economic agreement manifested itself in the complex relationship between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.
In the media, they were depicted (and depicted themselves) as opposites, sworn to each other’s destruction. Clinton offered himself as the tribune of the New America. He was thought to embody the spirit of the 1960s and something of the insurgent, free-spirited character of the New Left. Gingrich presented himself as the guardian of an older and “truer” America, one grounded in faith, patriotism, respect for law and order, and family values.
Yet, despite their differences and exhibiting hatred for each other, these two Washington power brokers worked together on legislation that would shape America’s political economy for a generation. Their behind-the-scenes collaboration made possible the triumph of the neoliberal order. Pulling back the curtain on the 1990s reveals a powerful and coherent economic accord that sustained the neoliberal order across decades of culture wars.
Trump and the new order
Few were as surprised by the outcome of the 2016 election as Donald Trump himself. He did not really expect to win. He had little familiarity with governance, either in the public or private sector. The Trump Organization, a closely held corporation run by relatively few people, did not prepare him well for leading a sprawling and complex federal state. Moreover, Trump had done little planning for his administration, a critical step for a president-elect with many government appointments to make and numerous policy matters to master.
But Trump remained a master at commanding the political stage and thus the attention of the nation. Virtually no Americans, irrespective of whether they supported or opposed Trump, could take their eyes off him, or rather off the screens serving up his latest provocations via their social media feeds. Day after day, Trump drew both the American media and the American public into his version of “the greatest show on earth” — an unending spectacle of enemies defenestrated, honor defended, accomplishments hailed and supportive foreign leaders (preferably with an authoritarian bent) lauded. Week after week, and then year after year, Trump’s antics gripped, divided and then exhausted America.
It was often hard to discern a consistent political program amid the heat and smoke that the Trump firestorm generated. But there were, in fact, two such programs issuing from the Trump administration: One pointed in the direction of maintaining the neoliberal order, the other in the direction of dismantling it. The second was the more important of the two and will likely have the more consequential long-term impact.
The Koch brothers, neoliberals to the core, had despised Trump during the GOP primaries. But Trump’s selection of Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, as his running mate, opened up the possibility of a rapprochement between the two camps. The Kochs had been grooming Pence for a position of national leadership. He brought their deregulatory agenda to the White House, along with the hope that he would be able to launch a campaign to strip multiple federal agencies of oversight authority and thus to limit the federal government’s ability to regulate the private economy.
Trump had never really believed that markets were perfectible as instruments of exchange, but he signed on to the idea of weakening the federal government anyway. Such an evisceration, he imagined, might expose and then undercut the “deep state” allegedly nestled in the CIA, FBI and other national security agencies and intent (he believed) on destroying his presidency. Trump also worked closely with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to appoint hundreds of judges to the federal bench whom the Federalist Society had identified as reliably deregulatory on economic policy and conservative in their approach to family values. Finally, Trump pushed a major revision of the tax code, one that sharply reduced corporate taxes and modestly reduced personal taxes for those in the highest brackets.
If deregulation, judicial appointments and tax cuts pointed toward the maintenance of a neoliberal order, however, Trump’s assault on free trade and immigration aimed at its destruction. In Trump’s eyes, free trade among nations was harming America; so was the free movement of people across national borders. Trump wanted to build walls against both and to allow into America only those goods and individuals that it wanted, and under conditions of its choosing.
Trump seized every opportunity to remove America from the international position it had long held as the leader of a globalizing and free trade world. He criticized Europe both for taking advantage of the United States in trade and for being unwilling to pay a fair share of the costs of maintaining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He became the first president to publicly question the value of NATO, and the close relations between Europe and North America that this multinational defense organization was meant to sustain. He supported Brexit, less out of enthusiasm for a fully independent Britain than out of a desire to hurt the European Union, the sort of globalist and cosmopolitan federation that Trump despised. He mused to the media about withdrawing American troops from South Korea, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Closer to home, Trump threatened trade wars with Canada and Mexico in order to compel those two countries to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement in ways that made it more favorable to U.S. interests (a threat he has made real in his second term).
More and more, the 2010s were coming to resemble the 1930s and the 1970s, earlier moments when the decline of a dominant political order had allowed ideas long consigned to the periphery of American politics to move into the mainstream.
Trump discovered that he could authorize tariffs unilaterally, without the cooperation of Congress, if he claimed that they enhanced national security. Part of Trump’s pitch was that free trade had benefited only the “globalists.” In an ad released in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had proclaimed that “a global power structure” had “robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” Trump promised that his presidency would upend that power structure and substitute for it one that benefited ordinary Americans.
Trump wanted the breakup of the neoliberal order to benefit the authoritarian right. But the breakup was also benefiting a social democratic left that liberal Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others had been infusing with new life. Trump’s constant talk of putting tariffs on imports, stopping the free movement of people across borders and challenging media companies had the effect of widening the space in which those engaged in politics could think more freely — and ambitiously — about the proper role of government in economic life. If the government could shape markets via tariffs and immigration restriction, might there be other ways in which the state could exercise authority over the economy? If social media companies could be regulated or broken up, what about other corporations that had accumulated too much power?
More and more, the 2010s were coming to resemble the 1930s and the 1970s, earlier moments when the decline of a dominant political order had allowed ideas long consigned to the periphery of American politics to move into the mainstream. If the ability to control the ideological mainstream was a sign of a political order’s triumph, the loss of that ability signaled a political order’s demise. Trump’s work, along with that of Sanders and Warren, in undermining neoliberal hegemony created additional opportunities for once peripheral political ideas and initiatives to flourish.
In the 2018 elections, the left turned its newly-acquired institutional capacity and ideological ferment into a measure of political power. Four progressive Democrats won congressional seats: Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez in New York, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib in Michigan. Their success, in turn, vaulted Sanders (again) and Warren into front-runner status for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. Warren built a national reputation in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008-09 by exposing the predatory lending practices of banks to exploit ordinary borrowers.
Later, and especially in her 2020 campaign, Warren also began targeting the nation’s social media and e-commerce companies — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft — for having accumulated too much wealth and power. Her staff worked to revive America’s anti-monopoly protest tradition, which a hundred years earlier had energized a progressive political movement that had checked private economic power both by breaking up large corporations and subjecting the ones that remained intact to regulation. Sanders’ plans were more ambitious than hers, as he sought to make his social democratic vision a reality in American life.
The unlikely facilitator of this left revival was Joe Biden, soon to become the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee and then president. In 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, few thought much of what Biden had accomplished across his long political career. But from March 2020 onwards, he found a way to invest his campaign with promise and appeal. He grasped as much as Sanders and Warren (and more than other contenders) that America was at an inflection point, that the Democratic politics inherited from Clinton and Obama no longer sufficed, and that the moment demanded thinking big and acting boldly. Biden welcomed Sanders and Warren supporters into his Democratic coalition and allowed them to influence an ambitious agenda: investing heavily in physical infrastructure, designing a vast new “social infrastructure” system to improve conditions for both America’s young and old, and incentivizing the private sector (via industrial subsidies) to reshore manufacturing and accelerate the country’s green transition. Biden’s desire to use public policy to steer markets toward serving the public interest broke profoundly from the economic orthodoxies that dominated during the heyday of the neoliberal order.
Biden’s victory in November 2020 earned him majorities in Congress, but ones that were too small to achieve more than a portion of his agenda. Even his genuinely impressive accomplishments — for example, approving more than 50,000 infrastructural projects in the first two years of his administration — received little public attention or support. Instead, the difficulties of restarting an economy that Covid had compelled the government to shut down dominated public consciousness, leading many to sour on those in charge. Much of the disenchantment with Biden was rooted in pandemic realities over which his administration had, in truth, little control: the loss of loved ones to Covid, long stretches of enforced personal isolation, and the disruption of supply chains that contributed to the worst inflationary spike in 50 years.
Though by multiple measures, the U.S. economy rebounded well in 2023 and 2024, to the point where it became the envy of many foreign leaders and observers, majorities of Americans were convinced otherwise. As infirmities of age stripped Biden of the ability to be an effective communicator for his own achievements, many began to look with rose-colored glasses at the “halcyon” days of the pre-Covid portion of the first Trump presidency. Forgiving Trump for his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat (and conveniently ignoring his role in fomenting the January 6 assault on the Capitol), these Americans carried Trump to victory in 2024.
What comes next
Thus far, the economic policies of Trump 2.0 have largely resembled those of Trump 1.0. He is imposing high tariffs on most imports to the U.S., scuttling the neoliberal world of free trade in the process. He wants to dismantle the regime of international law and multilateral organizations (IMF, World Bank, WTO) that undergirded both the New Deal and neoliberal orders. The EU has once again drawn his ire. He continues to talk openly about pulling the U.S. out of NATO, part of his attempt to deglobalize not just the international system of free trade but the Earth-spanning military shield that the U.S. has erected to protect such trade. Trump is as intent as ever on closing America’s southern border and on bringing illegal immigration to a halt while narrowing the streams of legal migration to the U.S. As before, he wants MAGA to transform America into an impregnable fortress, turning away all but the “choicest” immigrants.
Trump, however, is now far more aggressive and disciplined about pursuing his policy goals. He has a team, led by Stephen Miller and Russell Vought (architect of “Project 2025”), that spent its time out of power strategizing how to make the most of presidential authority should their man regain the White House. Trump’s shock-and-awe first 100 days, and the blizzard of executive orders that lie at its core, owe a great deal to Miller’s and Vought’s blitzkrieg battle plans, their offensive aided by Elon Musk’s willingness to come on board and deploy a team of DOGE commandos to blow up large portions of the “deep state.” Musk’s alliance with Trump is unlikely to last, but the rest of Trump’s team is devoted to him, with chief of staff Susie Wiles providing some administrative competence and calm behind the scenes.
Trump has also purged his administration (and much of his party) of Republican establishment figures. The Mark Kellys, Gary Cohns and Jim Mattises of Trump 1.0 are nowhere to be found in the current White House and Cabinet. Meanwhile, Trump seems no longer to fear a 20 to 25 percent stock market crash, which makes him more willing than he had been in his first term to upend the world trading and financial systems, believing that the rewards accruing to the U.S. long term will be worth what he considers to be short-term risk.
Will “Trump Unbound” succeed in building a new political order along the lines of its Rooseveltian and Reaganite predecessors? It is not yet clear. The chaos, unpredictability and lack of governing skill of Trump’s first term have reappeared in the second. The electoral coalition that put Trump back into office is larger and more diverse than Trump 1.0, generating internal conflict on key policy issues.
Take tariffs, for example. Part of Trump’s pro-tariff lobby is genuinely populist, in the sense that it believes that reshoring manufacturing will generate better jobs and greater opportunity for working-class Americans. Oren Cass of the think tank American Compass and Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs, speak for this populist, or what they would call an “economic nationalist,” constituency. So does Steve Bannon. Their supporters are strong in various government agencies, such as in the departments of State and Commerce. But in Congress, a core of Republicans, the last of the neoliberals, care most (and in some cases exclusively) about tax cuts and deregulation. Tariffs appeal to this latter group not because they may revive working-class fortunes but because they will generate external revenue large enough to facilitate a major income tax cut for the wealthy. Is Trump capable of managing a political coalition of tax cutters and economic nationalists, of upper-class and working-class constituents? Or will the divergent interests of these distinct groups cause the MAGA movement to splinter?
Is Trump capable of managing a political coalition of tax cutters and economic nationalists, of upper-class and working-class constituents? Or will the divergent interests of these distinct groups cause the MAGA movement to splinter?
Finally, Trump seems to have little interest in replicating a crucial feature of the Roosevelt and Reagan “political order” playbook: namely, winning a smashing political victory at the polls. The margins of the electoral victories won respectively by Roosevelt in 1936 and Reagan in 1984 were so large that the opposition — Republicans in the case of Roosevelt, Democrats in the case of Reagan — fell into disarray and acquiesced for years to the core political economic principles of the winning party. To achieve this kind of victory for himself (or his successor) in 2028, Trump might have opted to use his first year back in office to appeal even more than he did in 2024 to Latinos, African Americans and independents. But securing an expanded electoral coalition is not part of his governing plan. Instead, he is simply behaving as though he has already won a huge victory. The unrelenting pace with which he is issuing dramatic, and often draconian, executive orders is designed to make real the broad mandate that he believes he has earned.
Yet, this broad mandate is a fantasy. In his three runs for the presidency, Trump has yet to gain a majority of the popular vote. He did win the popular vote in 2024 (49.8 to 48.3 percent for Kamala Harris), but the magnitude of that victory cannot compare to the more than 58 percent of the popular vote and the 98 percent of the Electoral College vote won by both FDR and Reagan in 1936 and 1984, respectively. In 2024, a switch of a mere 270,000 ballots in three Midwestern states from the Republican to the Democratic column would have swung the Electoral College from Trump to Harris and put her in the White House.
Trump’s apparent indifference to expanding his electoral base to secure long-term MAGA dominance may reflect his belief that he can consolidate his movement’s power through other means. Here the critical influence may not be Roosevelt or Reagan, but Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Orbán has kept himself in power for 15 consecutive years by rigging Hungarian politics in his party’s favor. He has suppressed free speech, instilled fear in his political opponents who go against his wishes and vote for the “wrong” candidate, compromised the courts and stripped independence away from universities and other civil society institutions.
Some of Trump’s advisers wish to “Orbanize” America. They would like to curate the electorate to the point where small margin victories for an incumbent Republican Party is assured. Congress and the courts would be weakened to the point where they could no longer serve as checks on presidential power. In this scenario, America would still have semblances of democracy (elections would continue) but not its substance. This may be the future that Trump is imagining.
If he succeeds in this endeavor, Trump will have installed a new political order in America, but one unlike any that preceded it.
Gary Gerstle is professor emeritus and director of research in American history at the University of Cambridge. This essay is adapted from his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era” (Oxford University Press). Copyright © 2022 by Gary Gerstle.
This story appears in the June 2025 issue of DeseretMagazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.