Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism & Neofascism Defined

NEOLIBERALISM

'Neoliberal' means global 'free' production and trade without any restrictions, combined with privatization of all government assets and services at the local, state, national and global level. Under ideal neoliberalism, no laws or taxes restrict private economic interests and all things (including the labor of people) are owned by any person (or corporate entity) who has the wealth and influence to buy, claim, extort or even steal them.

To achieve this objective in the real world, a core tactic for securing neoliberalism is the luring and trapping of countries (and individuals) into debt (with interest) that they will never be able to pay back. In targeted countries this debt cooptation triggers national cuts in worker pay and welfare, and in spending on infrastructure (aka 'Austerity') in order to secure funds for debt repayment. Further, unpayable debt and interest also drives debtor nations to sell off government assets to banks and investors to fund the debt repayment. Workers in such debt impoverished nations are forced to be available to neoliberal capitalists at wages so low they do not maintain the health and general welfare of the workers - a form of wage slavery.

A key lever of this neoliberal tactic is to give huge infrastructure, relief, and/or weapons loans to poor countries from banks like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB/BID), European Central Bank (ECB), US Export-Import Bank (EXIM), and US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). When target nations fail to pay off the loans, banks and financiers swoop in and take the assets of the defaulting nation.

(Likewise on the individual level, all people who are not asset owners, are lured into interest-based credit card debt, home loans, student loans, payday loans, and other debt, which they can never fully repay, keeping them trapped in perpetual debt for the remainder of their lives.)

NEOCONSERVATISM

Neoconservatism combines the neoliberal tactics detailed above with aggressive overt or covert military or economic attacks and interventions on other countries, including war, coups, sanctions, ‘free trade’ lawsuits via WTO and World Bank ‘dispute’ tribunals, and the deployment of Economic Hitmen to coerce neoliberal dealmaking. (For the individual, neoconservatism uses laws, policing and courts to maintain debtors in perpetual debt slavery.)

In the first 9 minutes of the following video, former economic ‘hitman’ John Perkins gives an excellent breakdown detailing how neoconservative extortion and violence are used on nations to force them to comply with neoliberal cooptation.

An Economic Hitman's Confession and Call to Action ~ John Perkins

Neoliberalism Supercedes Political Parties

The corporate/bank coopted leadership and institutions of the US Democratic and Republican parties can now be described as both Neoliberal and NeoCon, as can the Labour Party and the Tories in the UK, the Social Democratic Party and Christian Democrats (CDU) in Germany, etc. This capture of ‘electoral’ government is another tool of neoliberalism, and also marks an evolution from neoliberalism into neofascism (see below).

Neoliberalism, combined with violent Neoconservative economic and military intervention, has been the modus operandi of the United States Empire since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, and these US tactics have become markedly more pervasive, organized, powerful and effective since World War II.

NEOFASCISM

Neoliberalism evolves into Neofascism when neoliberals in any given nation turn their neoliberal tactics and their neoconservative enforcement mechanisms inward on their own people. This is done for three reasons.

1) Neoliberals must control and suppress people in their own nation when those people rise up to demand an end to neoliberal exploitation and neocon warmaking on other countries (which the people both morally oppose and recognize is impoverishing their own nation internally through expenditure on wars).

2) Neoliberals must exploit their own populations when opportunities for neoliberal cooptation of other countries are maxed out. Neoliberal capitalists must turn their exploitation inward to avoid a collapse in the perpetual increase of interest-based debt and repayment flowing to themselves. If that mechanism ever stops growing larger, the whole system collapses (as it did during the Great Depression in the 1920s).

3) As neoliberals more and more deeply impoverish people in their own nation through both expensive external warmaking and internal neoliberal capture of their population in debt, the people inevitably rise up and fight back through demonstrations, civil disobedience, worker strikes, and the forming of an anti-capitalist counterculture. The internal adoption of neofascist policing and imprisonment is essential to squelching such public uprising.

Neofascism In Response To Revolution

In the people’s revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, both in the US and worldwide, such a public uprising against neoliberal wars and internal neoliberal cooptation was at its peak. People in colonized countries in Africa, South America, and elsewhere in the global South were simultaneously rising up against neoliberalism. The modern environmental movement also rose up to resist the rampant environmental destruction which accompanies neoliberal domination.

Realizing that these people’s revolutions threatened to end global neoliberal capitalist domination and profiteering, neoliberal governments like those of Ronald Reagan in the US, and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, began the process of turning neoliberalism inward on their own populations to institute neofascism.

Reagan and Thatcher weakened laws that controlled banks, enabled banks to more easily trap masses of people into new home mortgage debt, aggressively cracked down on worker strikes and broke the back of the union movement, and instituted a new drug war to provide policing mechanisms that were expanded in reach beyond mere drug crackdowns, to demonize and crack down on progressive uprisings, and further suppress Black and indigenous liberation movements.

However neither Reagan nor Thatcher were able to establish full neofascism in their cornerstone neoliberal nations. True neofascism began in the US under the administration of President Bill Clinton (see below) and has since gradually infused itself into Europe through the unelected supranational entities of the European Union and the European Central Bank.

Defining Fascism

With all of the realities established above, it is necessary to firmly anchor the definition of fascism in economics, and in the joining of corporate economic power with government enforcement power, to control and steer the behavior of the fascist nation’s own people, while expanding its power outward to control other nations. Both Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Benito Mussolini as the fascist leader of Axis Italy, properly centered this definition.

In full practice, fascism is the merging of state and corporate power to take national control and enforce dominance through mass surveillance, control of the media, police violence and mass imprisonment, and through the othering of some group (often immigrants) in order to blame the general economic hardship that is driven by fascism, on that innocent group, so that the fascists themselves are not blamed.

US Neofascism Established Under The Bill Clinton Administration

It was the administration of President Bill Clinton that turned the US into a formal neofascist oligarchy through:

• then Senator Joe Biden's 1994 Crime Bill, his Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995, and Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which together doubled the US prison population, weakened the ability of the accused to defend themselves under the law of Habeas Corpus, vastly increased mechanisms to federally pursue the Death Penalty, and created sweeping new legal definitions which categorized nonviolent Islamic, environmental, animal rights, anticapitalist, and some conservative activism as felony “terrorism”

• 120,000 more police (creating a war on Black people to entrench them as an unemployed underclass and thereby drive down wages and benefits of all others)

• the Telecommunications Act (allowing a small handful of corporations to replace free speech, control both broadcast and cable radio and television, and to take complete control of the emerging Internet)

• the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (allowing Wall Street to completely usurp and financialize the US economy)

• the bringing in of bankers from Goldman Sachs and other firms to literally run the White House (which was repeated under President Barack Obama)

• vast expansion of home mortgage, student, and credit card debt, the latter which tripled under the Clinton administration while real wages fell, flipping tens of millions of people in the US into debt-anchored living rather than income-anchored living (note: Senator Biden and others followed up under the George W. Bush and subsequent administrations to pass laws which prevent people trapped in debt from expunging their debts in bankruptcy)

• merciless, permanent, structural cuts to Food Stamps and other welfare programs spiraling millions of poor people into even deeper poverty - severe austerity labeled as ‘reform’

• expansion of polemic rhetoric and draconian immigration laws and enforcement which further demonized and criminalized undocumented immigrants, made it far more dangerous and deadly to cross the US/Mexican border, and mainstreamed formerly conservative negative attitudes toward undocumented immigrants (this combined with the Reagan drug war, served to marginalize both immigrant and Black communities as a demonized other)

US Neofascism In Action

This Neofascism as turned inward on the United States by the Clinton Administration has been successively ramped up and worsened by each successive presidential administration.

Bush II

The George W. Bush administration expanded anti “terrorism” laws (via bills like the Patriot Act, Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution, Homeland Security Act, Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, and Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act) to more seriously undermine nonviolent activism and to classify civil disobedience against, and even filming of corporate wrongdoing, as economic “terrorism”). The Bush Administration used these new laws to legalize torture, enable unconstitutional arrest and detention without charges, expand federal policing powers over all US citizens (through mechanisms like airport security screening and biometric identification), and expand National Security State surveillance of US citizens.

Obama

The Obama Administration vastly expanded mass surveillance on US citizens, and deeply undermined free speech and assembly, as well as protections from government search, seizure and arrest previously assured under the Bill of Rights. Obama used these expanded powers in collusion with US mayors to outright destroy the Occupy movement encampments nationwide, and he prosecuted and imprisoned more journalists and whistleblowers (for revealing US government malfeasance and war crimes) than all previous presidents combined. Obama also deepened the entrenchment of bank and corporate control of the US government, expanding US fossil fuel production more than any other president in US history (including Donald Trump) and bailing out banks after the 2008 mortgage crisis, while allowing those banks to foreclose on the home mortgages of 5 million families, afterwhich private investors completed the neoliberal circle of seizing and buying those foreclosed homes at very cheap prices. Obama trash talked and deported so many undocumented immigrants during his presidency (far more deportations than Trump) that he became universally known as the “Deporter in Chief”.

Biden

The Biden Administration dramatically attacked free speech and protest online, on college campuses, and in other pubic spaces, of conservatives (even shutting down the Twitter account of former president Donald Trump), critics of the pharmaceutical industry, and critics of Israel’s occupation and genocide on the Palestinians. These attacks on basic free speech and free press included the extensive censoring of both mainstream and alternative news sites. This was all foreshadowed by the specific suppression in the so called ‘liberal’ media (at the behest of the Democratic National Committee and the Biden campaign in the run-up to Biden’s 2020 election) of reports on international business corruption involving President Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and his brother James Biden.

Biden presided over years of COVID lockdowns, creating a test-run police state which dramatically reduced the personal freedoms of all US citizens, workers, and school children, triggered an economic crash, devastated incomes and housing security, and decimated small businesses. The people of the US became fundamentally dependent on Big Tech oligarchs. During the crash, banks and investors captured even more corporate ownership of housing and small business property. By the end of the pandemic and its economic aftermath (because Biden, like Obama before him, bailed out banks and corporations, but not households) personal credit card debt and household debt soared to record highs, with household debt rising from $14 trillion in 2019 to $18 trillion in 2024 - a massive neoliberal debt-slavery infusion to banks and credit card companies. All of these conditions resulted in the largest transfer of wealth in history from the 99% to billionaires and hundred billionaires and their corporations, and to banks and multi-trillion dollar investment firms like BlackRock - this while Biden promised and then largely abandoned, piddling debt relief for students and other debtors.

Biden also deported more undocumented immigrants than either Obama or Trump.

Trump

And of course, we are now seeing President Trump further and alarmingly jacking up all of the neofascist tactics previously deployed by other administrations.

Trump has engaged extreme public demonization of, and violent pursuit and arrest of immigrants, by masked Gestapo-like police, similar aggressive attacks on and Gestapo-style arrests of anti Israel protestors, widespread undermining of the rights of women, LGBT people, and Black and other voters, sweeping dismantling of agency enforcement of environmental and other laws limiting corporations, an almost comical further vast transfer of wealth from the lower classes to oligarchs via tax cuts, agency budget cuts, and truly unprecedented cuts to welfare and social programs, and finally the perpetuation of neoliberal wars of US empire which Trump promised during the 2024 election he would end - all of this with the continuous assistance of Trump’s corporate stacked Supreme Court which is routinely approving his avalanche of clearly illegal and unconstitutional actions.

Trump is now embodying and making visible to liberals for the first time, the Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and Neofascism, that has been happening quietly right under their noses since Bill Clinton was President of the United States, but which they have blindly ignored because their neofascist controlled news sources like CNN, MSNBC and NPR/PBS have so effectively manipulated them to believe that the ‘Democrats’ are the ‘good guys’.

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Eric Brooks is a full time grassroots organizer specializing in the interplay of global capitalist economics and war with energy policy, the climate and extinction crisis, and environmental justice.