SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B5ler? The answer, Olmsted argues, is that they
all subscribed to a deeply racist version of
nationalism. The press barons were more
than willing to use military force to establish
or uphold their country’s dominion over
non-White nations. Beaverbrook’s rationale
for appeasing Hitler was that by doing so
Britain could focus on maintaining its em-
pire; Hearst and McCormick believed that
American racial superiority meant that the
United States should dominate Latin Ameri-
ca.
The isolationist American publishers
showed a hatred for Japan that they couldn’t
seem to muster against Germany — and not
just because of Pearl Harbor. Hearst had a
long history of vicious anti-Asian racism, and
Joe Patterson nursed a fear that with Whites
distracted by their squabbles in Europe, the
“yellow race,” led by Japan, might take over
the world. The “vilest deed” of Nazi Germany,the neoliberal equation they were strictly
interdependent.
Under Clinton — “America’s neoliberal
president par excellence,” Gerstle writes —
the project was perfected. Cosmopolitanism
and diversity did reverse some of the con-
servative neoliberal cultural trends of the
previous decade. But the neoliberal order was
consolidated. Further deregulation followed,
from finance to telecommunication; the com-
promise between labor and capital collapsed;
inequality skyrocketed along with an increas-
ingly finance-centered economy; tough anti-
crime legislation was passed; free trade flour-
ished, if to the detriment of workers’ rights.
All of this happened on Clinton’s watch.
But the ascent and ultimate triumph of the
neoliberal order was short-lived. Some of its
inner fragilities and contradictions were all
too visible. George W. Bush’s hubristic, inept
policies aggravated them and accelerated the
downfall of the post-1970s order. Disastrous
foreign policy choices, epitomized by the Iraq
fiasco, reckless financial deregulation, the
speculative frenzy feeding the stock market
bubble and the intensification of income
inequality, collaborated to delegitimize the
neoliberal order, eroding its ideological foun-
dations and discrediting its political promis-
es. In 2008, the chickens finally came home to
roost. The economic crash affected millions of
Americans and shattered the global economy.
In the last, more impressionistic part of the
book, Gerstle examines Barack Obama’s re-But it was not until Reagan that neoliberal-
ism actively shaped the policy agenda of the
federal government. Deregulation became the
mantra of the decade, its most visible mani-
festation being the assault on collective bar-
gaining and the further weakening of already
struggling unions. Progressive taxation was
contested ideologically and dismantled politi-
cally: When Reagan was elected, the income
tax system was structured in 15 different
brackets, with the highest reaching 70 per-
cent; after his presidency, the country was left
with just two brackets, 15 and 28 percent.
To facilitate these changes and make them
unassailable, key institutions were drastically
reconfigured — beginning with the judiciary,
with the appointments of numerous con-
servative, “originalist” judges. Order and
stability, enforced through quasi-authoritari-
an tools, such as an aggressive, zero-tolerance
policy against crime, provided the structure
within which these changes could take place.
“Neoliberals,” Gerstle writes, “had long ar-
gued for the need to ringfence free markets,
limiting participation to those who could
handle its rigors.” Now they also embraced a
religiously imbued neo-Victorian moral code,
setting themselves in opposition to the per-
missiveness and moral relativism of the 1960s
and 1970s. The race-biased mass incarcera-
tion of an “underclass” — regarded as unfit to
handle those rigors — seemed to offer the
ultimate solution. Liberation and repression,
freedom and order, were not incompatible; inBook WorldTHE RISE AND
FALL OF THE
NEOLIBERAL
ORDER
America and
the World in
the Free
Market Era
By Gary Gerstle
Oxford
University Press.
406 pp. $27.95.THE
NEWSPAPER
AXIS
Six Press
Barons Who
Enable Hitler
By Kathryn S.
Olmsted
Yale University
Press. 314 pp.
$30sponse to the almost impossible challenges of
the post-2008 years as well as the unexpected
rise of Donald Trump. The ethno-nationalism
of the Trump era, Gerstle rightly stresses, was
a response to the delegitimization of the
post-1970s neoliberal order. It was just one of
the many byproducts of a crisis — of democra-
cy, globalization, cosmopolitanism — whose
long shadow still hovers over the United
States and the rest of the world.
It’s an apt and convincing closure for an
important and beautifully written book,
whose only, although not marginal, flaw is the
limited engagement with the global context to
which America’s story is tightly interconnect-
ed. In discussing this aspect, Gerstle makes
far too much of the collapse of the Soviet
Union and its socialist model, which he claims
removed a powerful barrier to the full unfold-
ing of neoliberalism. But this overlooks the
much more consequential transformation of
the world economy that began in the 1970s
and led to industrial outsourcing, cheap
imports, low inflation, financial speculation,
irresponsibly deregulated credit, booming
private consumption, Sino-American interde-
pendence and much else. These are the
conditions that resulted in the neoliberal
order’s rise, success and ultimate downfall.Mario Del Pero is a professor of international
history at Sciences Po in Paris, where he teaches
modern global history and the history of U.S.
foreign relations.Matthew Pressman is an assistant professor of
journalism at Seton Hall. He is researching a book
on the history of the New York Daily News.A“political order,” U.S. historian Gary
Gerstle writes, “is meant to connote a
constellation of ideologies, policies and
constituencies that shape American politics
in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-,
and six-year election cycles.” The New Deal
met that definition from the 1930s to the
1970s, and neoliberalism, he asserts, did so
from the 1970s to the 2010s, when it began to
splinter after the war in Iraq and the eco-
nomic crash of 2008.
In “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal
Order” Gerstle offers a rich and sophisticated
discussion of neoliberalism, which he says is
based on “the belief that market forces had to
be liberated from government regulatory
controls that were stymieing growth, innova-
tion, and freedom” — in other words, the
mirror image of the New Deal that came
before it.
It was Gerstle himself (with historian Steve
Fraser) who originated the idea of a specific,
modern U.S. “political order” in a 1989 book,
“The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order,
1930-1980.” Thirty years later he expands on
that concept. A political order, he says, must
have “consensus across the political spec-
trum” to “produce elections-proof structural
realignments.” It must have a “protean char-
acter,” which enhances “its appeal, allowing
its proponents to move in directions both old
and new, right and left.” In doing so, it bends
the opposition party to the will of the new
dominant party.
The neoliberal order was no exception.
Despite being a project incubated in Republi-
can circles and launched under Ronald Rea-
gan, its full-scale consolidation occurred un-
der the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton
in the 1990s.
The fundamental requirement of this neo-
liberal project, Gerstle writes, was the radical
expansion of the “terrain of human activities
subject to market principles.” Personal free-
dom and fulfillment depended on it: An
unconstrained market would unleash the
individual creativity and energy that had
been sedated under the New Deal order. But
this liberation — of the market’s transforma-
tive power and of individual liberty — para-
doxically required a strong and energetic
state, “necessary to free individuals from the
encroachments of government.” Finally, the
emphasis on individual emancipation — “the
thrill and adventure of throwing off con-
straints from one’s person and one’s work” —
could (and did) appeal to a New Left prone to
denounce corporate liberalism’s suffocating
conformism.
The conditions for the rise of a new order
had been prepared in the 1960s and ’70s,
when an anti-New Deal counter-establish-
ment began to lay the ground for a radical
turn. Its “constituent parts” — “the capitalist
donors, the intellectuals, the think tanks, the
politicians, the media, and the personal
networks linking them together” — were
visible and influential well before Reagan’s
election in 1980. Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy
Carter, ran on a promise to drastically reduce
the number of federal agencies and tested
some of the policies that these neoliberal
thinkers were advocating; think airline dereg-
ulation and the adoption of aggressive mon-
etary policies, which empowered the Federal
Reserve as never before.HISTORY REVIEW BY MARIO DEL PEROHow the neoliberal order triumphed — a nd why it’s now crumblingLARRY MORRIS/THE WASHINGTON POSTHistorian Gary
Gerstle calls Bill
Clinton “America’s
neoliberal
president par
excellence.” His
administration
promoted
deregulation, free
trade, tough-on-
crime measures and
an overhaul of
welfare.stated one Hearst editorial from 1943, was to
ally “against its own white race with the
yellow peril.”
Another unifying trait among the newspa-
per axis was their antisemitism. They es-
poused conspiracy theories about Jewish
influence in government and believed that
Jews themselves were to blame for antisemi-
tism. So they had little sympathy for Euro-
pean Jews suffering at Hitler’s hands, and
they suspected that American Jews were
scheming to force the nation into war — an
insinuation that appeared routinely in their
editorials.
Olmsted, a professor of history at the
University of California at Davis, sometimes
overstates the case that these publishers
enabled Hitler. Opposing the president in
wartime isn’t the same as aiding the enemy,
especially when the president truly is violat-
ing democratic norms (although the press
barons were less concerned with FDR’s actual
abuses, such as Japanese internment, than
with their paranoid fantasies about him
canceling elections). Also, many other Ameri-
can newspapers failed to take Hitler seriously
in the 1930s, and nearly all of them vilified the
Japanese more than the Germans (so did U.S.
government propaganda).
Yet in many ways, the members of the
newspaper axis were especially despicable.
Not only were their editorials extremist to the
point of being unhinged, their news coverage
was slanted too — and given that they had the
loudest megaphones, they had the most
power to do harm.
It would be comforting to think that such
irresponsible journalism is a historical relic.
But the parallels with today’s right-wing
media, on both sides of the Atlantic, are
unavoidable: displaying apathy or sympathy
toward brutal dictators (see Putin, Vladimir),
deriding efforts to address legitimate threats
(see pandemic, coronavirus) as schemes by
liberal elites to control the population. The
Hitler-enabling press lords, Olmsted writes,
understood “how to sell suspicion and hatred
to a mass audience.” Their successors apply
the same techniques.Times-Herald; and their cousin, Robert Mc-
Cormick, published the Chicago Tribune, the
nation’s top-selling broadsheet. Joining them
in firm support of isolationism was William
Randolph Hearst, whose media empire —
newsreels, magazines, a wire service and 28
major newspapers — reached tens of millions
of Americans.
Hearst went furthest in his dalliance with
Nazi Germany. He allowed Hitler and his
second-in-command, Hermann Göring (along
with Italy’s Benito Mussolini), to write self-
serving propaganda for his newspapers in the
1930s and paid them handsomely for it. After
meeting with Hitler in Berlin in 1934, Hearst
enthused about the way Hitler had restored
“character and courage” to Germany. On that
same trip, Hearst struck a film-swapping deal
in which parts of his company’s newsreels
would be shown in Germany, and in exchange,
Hearst would place German newsreel footage
— unfiltered Nazi propaganda — in the films
shown to American audiences.
The Patterson siblings and McCormick had
no affinity for Hitler, but they fiercely opposed
any aid to Britain that might risk drawing the
United States into war. They told their readers
that instead of worrying about dictators
overseas, they should focus on the would-be
dictator at home, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who they warned was conspiring
with his communist-leaning advisers to over-
throw American democracy. The Pattersons,
whose papers had supported FDR’s New Deal
during the 1930s, were latecomers to this line
of thinking — only when Roosevelt backed the
Lend-Lease Act in early 1941 did they turn
against him. But they made up for lost time by
attacking FDR with the same ferocity that
their cousin’s conservative Chicago Tribune
had shown for years.
Even after the United States entered the
war, Hearst, McCormick and the Pattersons
continued to depict the Roosevelt administra-
tion and America’s allies (Britain and Russia)
as the country’s “most insidious enemies,”
Olmsted writes. The notion that the isolation-
ists slinked away in shame after Pearl Harbor
and that nearly all Americans rallied around
Roosevelt is “mythology.”
So why were these publishers — who, apart
from Rothermere, disliked fascism — so
determined to either appease or ignore Hit-I
n most accounts of the fight against Nazi
Germany, the Americans and the British
get to be the good guys. But in “The
Newspaper Axis,” Kathryn S. Olmsted levels a
damning indictment against six of the most
powerful English-language publishers of the
World War II era. Although they claimed to be
patriots, they used their influence to down-
play, condone and sometimes even promote
Adolf Hitler’s rise.
The worst offender was Lord Harold Ro-
thermere, publisher of London’s Daily Mail, a
right-wing tabloid that sold more than 1
million copies a day. A supporter of Britain’s
fascist Blackshirts, Rothermere gushed in
print about how Hitler had “saved his coun-
try” from ineffectual leaders and had brought
“immense benefits” to Germany (Rothermere
was even more fawning in the private letters
he addressed to “my dear Führer”).
Rothermere’s friend Lord Max Beaver-
brook, whose Daily Express was the only
British newspaper with a higher circulation
than the Mail, also belongs in the newspaper
axis, Olmsted says. Although he is generally
celebrated for his role overseeing war indus-
tries for Winston Churchill’s government
during World War II, Beaverbrook had previ-
ously insisted that Britain should stay out of
Hitler’s way and that Hitler’s “exceptional
astuteness” meant he wouldn’t launch a war.
The bigger threat, Beaverbrook believed, was
Churchill. The two were longtime friends, and
Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard had em-
ployed Churchill as a columnist. But after
Churchill’s speech denouncing Hitler’s annex-
ation of Austria, Beaverbrook turned on him.
Not content with canceling Churchill’s col-
umn, Beaverbrook also told one of his report-
ers to compile a file of Churchill’s statements
that could be used to paint him as a warmon-
ger, saying, “He must be stopped.”
Across the Atlantic, several influential
American publishers agreed with Beaver-
brook that (in Olmsted’s words) “those who
wanted to resist the European dictators posed
a greater danger to their own country than the
fascist leaders themselves.” Three of them
were relatives: Joseph Medill Patterson ran
the New York Daily News, the highest-circula-
tion newspaper in the country; his sister,
Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, was in charge of the
capital’s best-selling paper, the WashingtonHISTORY REVIEW BY MATTHEW PRESSMANIn the pages of their newspapers, they downplayed Hitler’s threatHARRIS & EWING PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESSEleanor “Cissy”
Patterson, owner of
the Washington
Times-Herald, in
19 39. Her
newspaper was
among those that
advocated
isolationism as
World War II
loomed.