Neoliberalism and the Coming Political Revolt

Peter Yang, The China Academy, December 19, 2025 —

Neoliberalism is no longer just an economic system — it is a political liability. Across the United States, Europe, and East Asia, democratic societies are experiencing an unprecedented revolt against the establishment.

Approximately one year ago, Donald Trump was reelected as the U.S. president. His victory remains one of the most extraordinary reversals in modern political history: the first U.S. president impeached twice, the first former president convicted of felonies, and the first candidate since Grover Cleveland to return to the White House after a non-consecutive term. Yet for all the talk of political miracles, Trump’s victory might also be something else entirely: the last warning shot fired before Western society confront the consequences of decades of economic stagnation, institutional paralysis, and the widening gap between those who are overly represented and those who feel abandoned. If Western politics appears on the verge of revolution, it is because too many fault lines have converged at once, and the loudest of these tremors comes from one demographic that became central to electoral outcomes: young men.

The coalition that carried Trump to win the popular vote in 2024 is marked by the prominence of young men. The shift among men under 30—across classes, races, and regions, reached levels no modern Republican candidate had achieved. Their movement toward the right was not a fringe drift; it was a wholesale realignment. It reflected not simply ideological sympathy, but deep frustration over what they saw as eroding economic prospects and the sense that their tangible concerns ranked below cultural issues that had virtually no effect in improving their material conditions.

The election was shaped by two dominant themes: the economy and abortion. On the surface they seem unrelated, but they became proxies for an inter-gender political divide unprecedented in modern Western societies. Many young men were not animated by hostility toward abortion rights itself, as polling shows young men are not significantly more conservative on reproductive rights than older women. Their frustration stemmed from the belief that women voters prioritized abortion above what these men interpreted as more urgent economic issues: stagnant wages, rising housing cost, job security, and social atomization.

In particular, the nail in the coffin occurred when the media machine branded abortion as the existential issue of America to support Kamala Harris’s bid to become America’s first female President. While the Biden-Harris Administration is dangling nuclear war with Russia, the corporate media is trying to convince the young men that a total ban of abortion in 2025 is somehow feasible and America before 1960s (which abortion is banned) is a hellhole. Such condescension is sufficient to push young men to vote in overwhelming numbers against the establishment. The frustration, which was rooted not only economic decline but also perception of political abandonment proved decisive.

This pattern is not uniquely American. Variations of the same gender divide have emerged in South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK, where young women tend to move further left while young men drift toward anti-establishment or right populist currents. Such gendered political polarization is unprecedented in global scope.

To understand how this pressure built, one must look beyond individual elections and toward the broader arc of neoliberalism’s crisis. Entering the new century, neoliberalism, associated with globalized finance, created the greatest economic bubble in history—the subprime mortgage. The resulting 2008 financial collapse was followed by years of recession and unemployment across the world, particularly in Europe as the sovereign debt crisis intensified. As the West reeled in endless economic convolutions, the BRICS nations—particularly China, saw their economies surge forward through government-directed investment. The outcome was a sweeping repudiation of the neoliberal consensus. Privatization, deregulation, austerity, and global capital mobility were all deemed as the recipe of economic self-destruction.

Yet instead of addressing the underlying economic model, political elites—desperate to avoid accountability, redirected public anger away from financial institutions and toward cultural frictions. It is no coincidence that once Occupy Wall Street movement in America and the anti-austerity movement in Europe began, the cultural agenda of LGBTQ rights, feminism, and open borders—once anathema to corporations, suddenly became their favored priorities. Such extraordinary support was, of course, tactical: dominating headlines and public attention long enough so that none of the bankers who caused the crisis were prosecuted, and the companies that engaged in financial manipulation were again paying executives astronomical bonuses. Most importantly, the objective was not even to champion the rights of the oppressed, whether women or sexual minorities, but to generate cultural conflicts that consumed political energy in arguments that could not be resolved and became ever more abstract. From 2008 to 2024, the debate on LGBTQ rights devolved from same-sex marriage to gender identification, culminating in the staggering controversies surrounding the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics.

Meanwhile, as the debate on the gender pay gap raged on, corporations exploited legitimate outrage over the glass ceiling faced by female workers to champion a form of elite-friendly feminism. The goal was to create the illusion of increased representation at the top while leaving broader economic structures untouched. The outcome was another neoliberal rebirth. As highly educated women were integrated into upper managerial ranks, educational institutions increased female enrollment and opened new disciplines oriented toward women, regardless of academic value. As more women entered high-paying jobs, the consumer market expanded, creating new industries, brands, and startups—unicorns catering to female consumers. This renewed neoliberal emphasis on a consumption-based, service-oriented economy even as the West faced deindustrialization and crippling national debt. Finally, a new political class of female leaders was cultivated across the political spectrum: some championing immigrant rights, some promoting feminist foreign policy, some even calling themselves democratic socialists. But the pattern was obvious, they all supported liberal social values while maintaining the existing economic architecture.

This “market-friendly feminism” coexisted comfortably with corporate power but did little to address inequality. In practice, it obstructed efforts to resolve it. As corporations branded themselves as female-friendly, attempts to impose higher taxes on profits became impossible as they are said to be “harming the prospects of women workers.” Funding meant to assist K-12 education—far more vital for social mobility, was increasingly diverted to subsidize student loans for universities that enrolled more women and were overwhelmingly attended by the middle class, which required little further assistance. The #MeToo movement, which brought down numerous Hollywood figures, politicians, and media personalities, stopped short of exposing widespread harassment within corporate ranks and gave rise to a new feminist cultural industry tied to the profits of companies from Netflix to Disney.

While these developments undoubtedly addressed certain long-overdue gender disparities, they were perceived as coming at the expense of the working class, especially working-class men, who experienced steep declines in employment, educational attainment, and social mobility. In particular, elite-oriented feminism created a system where men at the bottom felt increasingly excluded from the economy, the culture, and the state.

And this perhaps explains the great paradox of why the underclass now supports populist politicians like Trump, whom they know may deliver only kleptocracy. Because although rent-seeking, corruption, and clientelism create hierarchical societies with little social mobility, but those hierarchies are predictable, governed by fixed and predictable rules, no matter how unfair the rules are. Money determines power; bloodlines determine influence. Neoliberalism, however, compounds inequality with an unfathomable hierarchy. The phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” which in practice often amounted to little more than promoting transgender athletes, offered neither diversity, equity, nor inclusion. This is the doublespeak and doublethink George Orwell predicted in 1984 coming into fruition. The corruption of language itself, leading to the loss of shared meaning, will inevitably breed political upheavals which history is replete with: from medieval serfs revolting against Latin-speaking clergy, to the French Third Estate tired of sermons on the “Divine Right of Kings,” to ISIS militants rejecting the language of secular modernity. Despite different context and historical periods, one common theme of these violence is clear: when millions of men who feel economically marginalized, ideologically homeless, and socially cornered, conditions ripe for political instability.

The response of neoliberal elites to the new threat of angry and nihilistic young men has been to declare a “state of emergency.” As Trump surged in the 2024 polls, Europe moved into a defensive crouch. France’s constitutional court banned Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally, from running in the next election. Germany labeled the AfD, the Alternative for Germany, an “extremist threat” subject to surveillance. Romania canceled and reran an election outright. The great irony is that Western courts, bureaucracies, and media institutions invoked the language of Carl Schmitt—a Nazi jurist, to justify emergency actions to protect the constitutional order from extremism. The establishment also desperately invoked the traditional tools used to mobilize young men—national security, patriotism, geopolitical conflict. They branded Russia, Iran, and even China as great “systemic threats” to Western values, predictably highlighting their opposition to progressive norms.

These efforts proved to be futile. Anti-establishment sentiment has reached historic highs across the West, as voters increasingly believe the system reacts more aggressively to electoral threats than to declining living standards. Younger men, rather than being persuaded by warnings about extremism, often interpret such measures as evidence that elites fear losing control of a system that no longer delivers for ordinary people. In addition, young men also express deep skepticism toward foreign interventions. Proxy wars in Ukraine, support for Israel, and involvement in the Taiwan Strait have become deeply unpopular among young men. This is unsurprising—they know they will be the ones sent to the front lines and likely forgotten even if the wars are won.

There is also a structural dimension. As marriage declines and fertility decreases thank to progressive values cultivated by neoliberalism, aging populations impose ever-harsher burdens on the young. Older voters—more likely to vote, more likely to support the status quo, and more likely to preserve their share of an increasingly unequal economic pie—continue to overshadow the political influence of younger generations. This intergenerational imbalance fuels a sense of democratic disenfranchisement, reinforcing the belief among many young men that the existing system will not, or cannot, address their losses. This also explains the unprecedented level of support for authoritarian regimes among the young.

Despite these developments, neoliberal elites remain intransigent, searching for yet another solution to the crisis of their own making. But if history offers any warning, it is that emergency constitutionalism rarely stabilizes democratic systems under such conditions. Weimar Germany’s experiment in crisis governance did not halt the forces that ultimately destroyed it. What preserved democracy in the West during the 1930s was not emergency decrees but redistribution. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States provided the material security necessary to contain political extremism, not by suppressing dissent, but by addressing its root causes.

Today the West confronts a similar dilemma. The tools of contemporary neoliberal governance—central banks, market incentives, technocratic oversight, cannot solve the deeper legitimacy crisis. To preserve its long-cherished democracy, the state needs to reclaim powers long ceded to capital, restore public goods, and rebuild the economic foundations of social stability. The West may once again need to seriously reexamine its past success, this time by expanding the power of the state to constrain capital. But the timing might already be too late.

Here lies the paradox of Trump’s second term. While his base is fueled by anger and alienation, his early agenda centers on consolidating executive power, restructuring the bureaucratic state, and implementing Project 2025—an effort to reshape federal authority in ways his critics describe as authoritarian. But for all the debates, both advocates and critics seem to agree that this trajectory is inevitable and necessary. Only a more paternalistic version of government, can be America’s last hope of reversing the self-inflicting wounds it did on itself.