O "Novo Consenso de Washington" ou o Enterro do Neo-Liberalismo

Trump conquistou o poder com um "Make América Great Again" que foi o toque de finados da "globalização" e da sua apologética narrativa "neo-liberal". Trump tinha sabido envergar e muito bem vender o discurso político (elaborado por Steve Bannon) que fazia o encontro entre uma emergente e nova racionalidade geopolítica e as angústias da maior minoria americana, os trabalhadores brancos ou, no dizer da senhora Clinton, os "deploráveis", também ditos em linguajar de sociólogo, os "white trash". Ninguém quis perguntar, na altura, por quem dobravam os sinos. Era mais fácil atribuir a "inesperada" vitória de Trump a uma "conspiração russa". Eleito Biden, muita gente tomou a nuvem por Juno ou os seus desejos pela realidade e "achou" que esta vitória do candidato do PD era um retorno ao pré-Trump. Enganaram-se, claro.

Joe Biden prosseguiu e desenvolveu a política MAGA de Trump mas mudando-lhe a imagem: vestiu-lhe uma roupagem sexy e estampou-lhe um sorriso na cara. Assim, continuou a fatal erosão do velho "consenso de Washinton", que vinha dos anos 80 do século passado com as suas narrativas da globalização produtora de felicidade e do neo-liberalismo produtor de racionalidade económica. A oração fúnebre foi agora rezada pelo National Security Adviser do Presidente Biden, Jake Sullivan, que, enquanto enterrava o velho "consenso", aproveitou para apresentar o novo.

The New Washington Consensus

Franklin Foer | The Atlantic | May 10, 2023

Earlier this month, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan delivered a speech at the Brookings Institution that historically would have made for front-page material but barely registered in the world beyond wonkdom. His address was a muscular statement of ideological intent.

Jake Sullivan (National Security Adviser, do Presidente Biden)

He argued that President Joe Biden’s agenda channeled a set of ideas Sullivan called the “new Washington consensus.” There was a bit of cheek in his use of that term. The Washington Consensus was a phrase that entered circulation at the very end of the 1980s, describing the emerging bipartisan faith in globalization, deregulation, and the wisdom of markets, suited to an era of optimistic triumphalism. But that era is ending. Or, as Sullivan put it, “The last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations.”

What Sullivan championed in the speech was something like the antithesis of that old paradigm. He said that ever-greater global interdependence is no longer desirable. One reason is China, which participates in global capitalism without fairly playing by its rules. Another is the realization, exposed by the pandemic-induced crisis in the intricate global supply chain, that the American economy is vulnerable to even small disruptions on the other side of the planet. That crisis was an indication that the world has gone too far in a libertarian direction and needs the sort of regulation and government investment that only a short while ago were highly unfashionable in the Washington policy sphere.

Although he didn’t justify his use of the term this way, he could get away with describing his views as representative of a new “consensus”: Both Trump and Biden have positioned themselves as economic nationalists, self-consciously abandoning the precepts of the old order.

That’s not to describe the Trump and Biden versions of economic nationalism as equivalent.  Although Trump delivered vituperative speeches, inflected by xenophobia, about elites destroying American manufacturing, he didn’t really have any ideas about how to reverse course beyond jacking up tariffs. Biden’s national-security adviser, by contrast, put a big idea at the center of his speech. He extolled the virtues of industrial strategy: a new role for the state in directing the trajectory of the economy.

Industrial strategy begins with the premise that the national interest demands that certain industries flourish domestically. .....

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-new-washington-consensus/ar-AA1aWvVE