Let us begin by diving into a false bipartisan disappointment, both puppeted to us by the filthy Epstein class over past decades, and name the culprits plainly: Both "Neoliberalism" and "Neoconservatism". Different accents, same sermon. Which together have made a rather impressive mess of things.
Unlike in The Matrix where Neo is an anagram for "one", from a modern definition neo just means "new". Which in this case is only the last half century. Neoliberalism thinks "the market as deity" while Neoconservatism thinks "the empire as crusade".
Neoliberalism emerged with the promise that if you liberated markets - cut regulations, privatized industries, let capital roam freely, prosperity would trickle down like some benevolent rainfall. Figures such as Milton Friedman and politicians like Margaret Thatcher helped usher this golden shower ideology into the orthodoxy of the idiocracy. The problem is not markets per-se, especially smaller markets like the farmers market, those are as old as trade itself, but instead the quasi-religious belief that markets, no matter how large and enshitified, are somehow self-justifying. To fast forward to the upcoming conclusion of this piece... the good kind of Libertarianism is called Libertarian Socialism but if you remove the social aspect there's a joke which says "How many Libertarians does it take to change a lightbulb? None, the free market will take care of it." Under neoliberalism Inequality becomes not a flaw but an outcome to be rationalized and public goods such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure are treated as commodities rather than rights and economic “efficiency” is elevated above human dignity, as if GDP were a moral philosophy. The result? Vast wealth concentration and hollowed-out public institutions which no wonder have now lost public credibility.
Now enter neoconservatism, particularly in U.S. foreign policy. Its guiding notion is that American imperial power — military, political, cultural, ought to be actively deployed to reshape the world, often under the lies of spreading democracy when its really just old school imperial stealing of resources. A notorious outing of which came with the Iraq invasion, (a now modest looking dumpster fire which now pales in comparison to the attacking of Iran cubed dumpster fire debacle) championed by ignoramuses like George W. Bush, who we thought we couldn't get any worse then, boy were we wrong, and dark architects such as Paul Wolfowitz. The defects here are painfully obvious such as a chronic overestimation of how easily societies can be remade by force or a tendency to moralize geopolitics, casting wars as liberations and invasions as gifts, and resulting catastrophic unintended consequences such as instability, civilian suffering, and the occasional birth of the very extremism one claimed to extinguish. It is missionary zeal with cruise missiles and after both of these things have gone on for decades we now have billionaire weirdo dorks who are on their way to becoming trillionaires while thanking the invisible hand while their hands help bomb kids and grope kids.
Now, here’s where the plot thickens: these two ideologies, though ostensibly distinct, collaborate. With Neoliberalism weakening countries internally — privatizing, deregulating, and reducing social cohesion and Neoconservatism projecting worse power, hard power, externally — asserting dominance, often violently. Together, they produce a world in which markets roam free at home and militaries roam free abroad. One dissolves social contracts; the other enforces geopolitical ones. Both rely on a kind of utopian simplification: Neoliberalism: humans are rational consumers; markets will sort it out and Neoconservatism: nations want what we want; force will speed the process. Reality, being stubbornly complex, refuses to comply. Why they both “grabage,” in plain terms, is because both substitute ideology for humility. Both elevate abstract systems, market or military, above lived human experience. And both have shown a remarkable ability to ignore evidence when it contradicts their tidy theories. If one wished to be particularly uncharitable one might say Neoliberalism commodifies everything and Neoconservatism weaponizes everything and between the two, the citizen is left either as a consumer to be optimized or a pawn to be deployed. A rather poor bargain!
And this is why, to rewind to what we said earlier, cue imperial heads exploding, a much better alternative is Democratic Socialism or even better not yet achieved Direct Democracy. A balanced center where: There are Markets, but governed. There is soft power, but constrained. There are nations, but they are cooperative. And there are leaders, who are accountable. Not terribly sexy. No banners, no messiahs, no thunderous declarations about civilizations ending by nightfall. But it has one decisive advantage over the grander ideologies: it tends to work.