link

Analysing Trump's shocking victory, professor Cornel West maintains that it represents the "desperate and xenophobic cry of human hearts for a way out from under the devastation of a disintegrating neoliberal order". "It was the lethal fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating," West explains, that has brought neoliberalism to its knees.

But is neoliberalism really on its knees?

The owner of a vast business empire, President-elect Trump is, more than anything else, a businessman. Not having one iota of political experience, he ran on an anti-politics ticket in which his business acumen was touted as a serious qualification for the presidency. Indeed, he promised to run the government like a business enterprise.

Trump's cabinet picks suggest that, perhaps for once, he was not misleading the public. Talking neoliberal-speak, their rhetoric is uncannily familiar: privatisation, deregulation, capital enhancement, and entrepreneurialism.

The soon-to-be-Secretary of Education, Republican billionaire Betsy DeVos, for example, has been instrumental in deregulating Michigan's charter schools. Not unlike the privatisation of prisons, in Michigan, around 80 percent of these schools are currently run by private companies.

Similarly, Tom Price, Trump's pick for secretary of health and human services, wants to privatise healthcare reform, allowing "flexibility" while instituting dramatic changes to the tax code.

West is consequently wrong on this particular front. What we are likely to witness is not the end of, but rather a trumped-up version of, neoliberalism.

If, in the Barack Obama years, we saw neoliberalism intersect with a variety of progressive projects, such as marriage equality, in the coming years Americans will likely be subjected to a convergence between ethnonationalism and neoliberalism.

Nothing new

Actually, this convergence is nothing new. One has only to look at Israel, where since the mid-1980s neoliberalism has been thriving in conjunction with ethnonationalism and a colonial settler project.

West's claim that hyper-nationalism, or even neo-fascism, will ultimately usher out our neoliberalism era, therefore, doesn't ring true to people coming from my neck of the woods.

Over the years, we have witnessed how the Israeli government has effectively mobilised hyper-nationalism to further entrench neoliberalism, by harnessing hate towards Palestinians with the hope of deflecting and covering up the devastating repercussions that neoliberal economic policies have had on large segments of its Jewish citizenry.

Israel is also living proof that a country can create walls for certain "undesirables" while allowing capital to flow unhindered.
It would be a mistake, however, to understand neoliberalism as merely a set of economic policies. Rather, it is a regime of truth and value that construes all aspects of our world as business enterprises; even human beings are increasingly transformed into a kind of "human capital".
In other words, under neoliberalism, we increasingly relate to ourselves as a resource in which we must invest in order to increase our value over time. In such a regime, only capital-enhancing subjects are worthy and only human capital that enhances the credit of the nation, now construed as a business enterprise, will thrive. This is precisely Trump's dream for America.