Put a fork in it — it’s done.

Neoliberalism was initially advanced and popularized as part of a comprehensive effort to turn the page on the New Deal approach to economic growth, which include public investment, income security, and robust regulation. Shared public benefit was replaced with private profit. Public responsibility was replaced with shareholder value maximization. And managed markets were replaced by a free-for-all of concentration and exploitation.

While Ronald Reagan was the best-known political exponent of the philosophy, and neoliberal tenets have been aggressively pursued by every Republican president since, this way of thinking has also infested Democrats from Clinton to Obama and beyond. Across party lines, elected officials have increasingly assumed that reducing regulations is always productive, tax cuts are always on the table, lowering wages is always beneficial, public investments are always less productive than private ones, and extraordinary wealth concentration was a necessary part of how the system works.

The result of the neoliberal consensus of the past 50 years: record corporate profits, historic levels of income inequality, and decades of wage stagnation for hardworking Americans. But the Great Recession of 2008 put neoliberalism on death watch, and the COVID pandemic has sent it into a death spiral.

In its place has emerged middle-out economics, which explains that a consumer capitalist economy doesn’t grow from the top down, but from the bottom up and the middle-out. CEOs aren’t the ones who create jobs — middle-class consumers do it by spending money, creating jobs through increased demand. Public investments and targeted regulations are a necessary part of what government does to grow the middle class and manage competitive markets. And raising wages and lowering costs is what powers economic growth and innovation.

The last 50 years of economic results are the strongest possible indictment of the neoliberal approach, and history is turning the page on this point of view. But the false claims of this philosophy have become so deeply embedded in our political culture that the neoliberalism outlook continues to have real-world impacts … until now.

The time has come — neoliberalism must die.