Trump’s tariffs and the mutation of neoliberal ideology

President Donald Trump’s tariffs, while destabilizing both domestic and global markets, signal more than a shift in trade policy — they mark a rupture in the dominant political-economic consensus. That rupture has sparked a wave of speculation: Is neoliberalism truly in decline? What does the rise of technocratic oligarchs within the state mean for governance? And how will this trade war reconfigure the geopolitical balance, especially with China?

Neoliberalism’s supposed collapse has been forecast for over a decade. From the 2008 financial crisis to Covid, each convulsion has been treated as its death knell. Trump’s mercantilist turn only deepens the sense of ideological disarray. But what does identifying these shifts actually enable?

An economic regime does more than dictate fiscal policy — it naturalizes a worldview. Neoliberalism was not merely a project of deregulation or privatization. It diffused a cultural logic: one that enshrined individualism, consumer sovereignty, and the sanctity of the market. That logic is fraying — but not disappearing. Trump’s protectionism may appear to reject neoliberal orthodoxy, but domestically, he doubles down on its core tenets.

Trump’s admiration for William McKinley, whose protectionist policies bolstered corporate consolidation and imperial expansion. The historical parallel is not incidental. Yet this is no Gilded Age redux. The post-Trump horizon is not a revival of progressive trust-busting. Instead, we face an intensifying fusion of state and capital, mediated through new forms of authority: technocratic, oligarchic and digital.

Tariffs, then, are more than policy — they are symbolic. Trump has distanced the U.S. from neoliberal international structures like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, NATO, the IMF and the World Bank. But even as he withdraws from multilateralism, he reasserts American dominance, especially over Latin America — echoing McKinley’s imperial vision.

Paradoxically, while the Bretton Woods institutions weaken abroad, the domestic scene resurrects neoliberal logics in mutated form. The rhetoric may be anti-globalist, but the political economy remains structured by the same imperatives. Take the Inflation Reduction Act: touted by Biden as a turn from the Washington Consensus, it in fact offers tax breaks and incentives to corporations — market-based climate policy dressed in green.

What this reveals is the evolving role of the nation-state. As globalization fragments, capital no longer floats frictionlessly across borders. It now relies on the infrastructure, subsidies and geopolitical security provided by the state. Capital’s toolkit is expanding — not abandoning — the state, repurposing it as a vehicle for accumulation.

Neoliberalism, then, has not entirely collapsed but has mutated. State power is not replacing markets — it is reinforcing them in new ways. Much of the ideological content, however, remains intact. Deregulation continues apace. On April 9, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate “anti-competitive regulations,” proclaiming that competition “lowers prices, speeds innovation, and increases consumer options.” The language is revealing. The consumer remains the sovereign subject, individuality reigns and freedom is still defined by market choice.

Trump has only continued to intensify domestic neoliberalism. If international neoliberalism is in retreat, it is only because its assumptions have been re-inscribed at home through new institutions and actors. The oligarchs are no longer merely lobbying the state — they are the state. Elon Musk isn’t influencing policy from the outside; he’s embedded in its production.

The line between public governance and private enterprise has blurred. What emerges is a techno-economic arms race in which the tools of neoliberalism — individualization, metrics, consumerism — are not abandoned, but refined. The stakes are not just economic. They are ideological. What’s shifting is not simply trade strategy, but the attempt to maintain hegemony over common sense itself.

So what does it mean to chart neoliberalism’s transformation? Why does this matter?

Revisiting neoliberalism’s birth helps to guide these questions. It did not emerge purely from the crises of the 1970s. It was forged through a confluence of geopolitical interventions — Pinochet’s Chile, the debt regimes of Latin America, Thatcher’s cultural counter-revolution, Reagan’s attack on labor. These were not discrete economic events but ideological productions. Together, they formed the terrain on which neoliberalism flourished.

In other words, ideology does not arise from a single crisis, but from multiple, intersecting ruptures. Today’s moment demands a similar lens. It is not simply about the failures of globalization or the return of protectionism. It is about the recomposition of power.

The ruling class is rearticulating itself. No longer confined to industrial capitalists or financiers, it now includes a caste of technocratic oligarchs — figures who perform anti-establishment rebellion while embedding themselves deeper into the state. They claim the mantle of innovation, freedom and disruption, even as they accelerate surveillance, labor exploitation and public disinvestment.

Trump’s populism feeds on this dynamic. His rejection of global institutions coincides with a rejection of multiculturalism, of collective identity, of historical memory. What he offers in return is a vision of cultural nationalism — atomized, individualized and hierarchical.

In this context, Trump’s appeal is more than economic. It is affective. For many, supporting him is not a return to order, but an act of rebellion. His antiestablishment posturing turns alienation into identity. It transforms social dislocation into spectacle. A meme becomes a movement. A Nazi salute becomes a signal of freedom. “Anti-wokeness” becomes a shared affective language through which hierarchy is re-legitimized.

In rejecting globalization, Trump also rejects multiculturalism, offering in its place a nationalist, individualized and unequal cultural vision. What distinguishes this era from Trump’s previous presidency — or earlier iterations of authoritarian populism — is the unprecedented proximity of tech oligarchs to state power, and the invasive reach of their technologies into our daily lives.

This is not merely an economic transformation — it is a battle over common sense. Understanding it requires a full historical excavation: tracing the political, economic and cultural threads that compose our present. Only by mapping this ideological terrain can we challenge the consensus forming before our eyes — a consensus where inequality deepens, democracy erodes and freedom is reduced to the act of consumption.

Only by confronting this terrain — its crises, its continuities, its contradictions — can we begin to imagine a way out

Carter Myers-Brown is a New York-based essayist who writes about labor policy, the environment and social movements.