George Monbiot being interviewed on the This Is Hell Podcast about escaping the wreckage of neoliberalism:

We’re seeing several things happening all at once. First, those who were exposed by the crisis of 2008, the great supporters of the neoliberal narrative, seeing that no one was coming up with a coherent challenge to them, doubled down on that narrative and responded to the crisis with neoliberal austerity, further controls on trade unions, further tax cuts for the rich, further deregulation, the whole neoliberal agenda. They just intensified it.

Other people recognised, as many now do, that the philosophy has been a catastrophe for human beings and for the rest of the living world and are desperately casting around for a response to it, and unfortunately in most cases, the response has been to try and reclaim some kind of Keynesian social democracy, and it’s just not going to work in the 21st century. Partly for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, but partly also because it tries to stimulate a growth based economy, and when your economy keeps growing on a planet that is not growing it burns through the environmental boundaries, and that’s what we’re seeing happening world wide at the moment with climate breakdown, with the loss of soils, with mass extinction, with air pollution and so many other crises that we’re facing as a result of perpetual economic growth, so we really need a new system.

But then the third response has been to say 'politics just isn’t working for us'. Part of the neoliberal approach is that you shouldn’t do things through politics, you should only do them through the market, that politics is dead. Well if politics is dead then people can’t pursue any political solutions within democracy. And so they say, let’s choose to follow someone who’s outside of politics, someone who isn’t part of the usual political establishment, someone who tells us that we can triumph once more. And so you then get the election of demagogues and fascists. Donald Trump being certainly an example of the former.

We see fascists rising in one form or another all over the world at the moment and this is a response to the political failure caused by a doctrine which says basically that governments should step out of the way, that there shouldn’t be any effective political response, governments should not try to change social outcomes. And so people see themselves falling into disaster and say well government isn’t helping us, we need someone who's completely different from any government we’ve ever seen before, and that someone is a fascist or a demagogue.

This is a very dangerous age and it’s because we have failed to produce a compelling and positive and inspiring restoration story with which to replace the failed story of neoliberalism that we see the rise of fascism, and so this isn’t just a nice thing we might do. We might think ‘ooh let’s tell a better story and we might have a better politics’. This is an urgent quest to find a story which fills the gaping hole, the great vacuum into which the fascists step. If we want to stop fascism from repeating what happened in the 1930’s, we urgently need to tell this new restoration story.