As the old saying goes, “you can’t beat something with nothing.” A two-stage process To understand what it would take to rid ourselves of the neoliberal ideas and policies that have negatively affected Western economies, societies, and democracies for decades, we need to  occur. The rise and fall of economic paradigms and ideologies can be conceptualized as a two-stage process. In the first stage, dissatisfaction with a dominant ideology grows, or recognition of its inadequacy.

These perceived shortcomings create the potential – what political scientists call “political space” – for change. But even once that space opens up, the question remains of whether another ideology – and, if so, which one – will replace B2B Fax Database the old one. For an existing ideology to collapse, things must progress beyond the stage where it is criticized and attacked, to a second stage where a new, more plausible and attractive ideology emerges to replace it.

This process is clearly reflected in the rise of neoliberalism itself. During the postwar period, a social democratic consensus reigned in Western Europe. It was based on a compromise: capitalism was maintained, but it was a very different capitalism from its early 20th-century counterpart. After 1945 Western European governments promised to regulate markets and protect citizens from the most destabilizing and destructive consequences of capitalism through a variety of social programs and public services. For decades, this order worked quite well.