The surprising decision by English and Welsh (though not Scottish or Northern Irish) voters to leave the European Union only makes sense in the broader context of the breakdown of the ideological consensus that dominated politics throughout the world until the global financial crisis. Precisely because of its dominance, this ideology was seen as common sense by its adherents. Its opponents gave it various names, including economic rationalism (in Australia), Thatcherism (in Britain) and the Washington Consensus (in the Third World), but the most common was “neoliberalism.”

As neoliberalism has declined, it has been challenged on the right by the politics of tribalism, embodied in the Brexit vote and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. There have also been challenges from the left, reflected in the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the British Labour Party and the strong showing of Bernie Sanders in the US Democratic primaries. To understand what is going on here, it is necessary to go beyond using neoliberalism simply as a pejorative, and to understand it as a powerful, but ultimately wrong and dangerous, way of thinking about the world.

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