Neoliberal ideology is in retreat, while nationalism is on the rise. But The Economist remains wedded to its traditional programme.
Some things you can set your watch by in the British media. The Economist’s editorial line is among them, the answer is threefold: deregulation, privatisation and free trade.
And, if all else fails, there’s always military action.
In its 180-plus years, The Economist has covered every major event of its time. Still characterised as a newspaper despite its magazine format, the weekly has published leading politicians and economists throughout its existence.
It may be a cliché that the financial press is where the ruling class speaks to itself. But it’s also true.
You can say this about The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. And you can say it about The Economist.
What’s clear is that these publications represent different sections of capital in different ways.
A younger cousin to The Spectator, The Economist is not quite as neocon as The Wall Street Journal, but not as softball centrist as the FT.
Historically, The Economist has represented a particular expression of liberal ideology, with its exaltation of market forces and penchant for US foreign wars. Yet that role has been shaken.
What’s changed is that the liberal politics of high finance and big tech no longer define the world order. The age of Donald Trump is defined by the return of hard borders and protectionist measures, combined with growing authoritarianism.
Over the last decade, The Economist’s world has been turned upside down by national populism.
The critique of globalisation doesn’t belong to the radical left anymore. Now it’s also a dirty word for the conservative right.
Naturally, the editors of this magazine supported Israel’s war in Gaza since October 2023.
However, The Economist has taken a more critical line in recent months as the unfolding horror story has become “too much” for many establishment liberals.
This in itself may be enough to signal a crisis of confidence.
Western power is not what it used to be, nor is it the cause of liberal interventionism. The Russia-Ukraine war might even be the last stand for some of the publication’s writers.
Once a British periodical for British readers, in the wake of the Cold War, The Economist became a globalist brand for Davos Man — the perma-tanned entrepreneur who attends the World Economic Forum every year.
However, Davos is not an alternative power centre to Washington, DC. The World Economic Forum is no bulwark against global Trumpism, either.
The first sign was Trump addressing the audience at Davos in 2018. He returned in 2025, but with more legitimacy than ever. Things may never be the same.
Liberals At Large
Reality came knocking after the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory. The Economist’s self-satisfied illusions were shattered in two dramatic blows.
Nevertheless, the publication has worked hard to reconstruct those illusions.
This is why The Economist fell head over heels for Emmanuel Macron and why it supported Keir Starmer last year.
By contrast, it has struggled to find any hope in Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who was openly dismissive in one interview.
The Economist tried to reason with the Argentine leader, stressing that it, too, is against socialism. “It doesn’t show,” Milei said, laughing at his questioner.
“People who are against socialism are also concerned about other things,” the interviewer explained. “Climate change, for example, or freedom of the press.”
“In other words, Cultural Marxism,” Milei replied.
These snarky remarks were reminiscent of Italian populist Silvio Berlusconi calling the magazine “The Ecommunist” in response to the publication’s scathing coverage of his government.
More importantly, Milei’s comments showed just how far The Economist is now out of step with global right-wing politics.
The wild man of Buenos Aires represents a very different strand of small-government ideas.
If there is an afterlife, Berlusconi has probably had the last laugh.
The Berlusconi model of shameless vulgarity and anti-political cynicism has triumphed. Now there’s someone very much like Il Cavaliere in the White House.
The signs were visible to the right kind of eyes.
Everything should have changed after the 2008 financial crisis. The Economist should have questioned the neoliberal dogma of banking deregulation.
Instead, the publication doubled down and became one of the major cheerleaders for austerity in the West. It heaped praise on the Cameron government for its ambitious plans to shrink the state.
At the same time, The Economist supported the EU’s efforts to force spending cuts on Southern Europe during the eurozone debt crisis.
The crisis culminated in a stand-off that saw European institutions impose a crippling austerity regime on Greece.
The Economist wasn’t alone in its complacent pro-European position at the time. No one in the mainstream liberal media could see what was coming.
Of course, The Economist saw no hope in Labour’s left turn in 2015, either.
An editorial dismissed Jeremy Corbyn as a socialist dinosaur leading Labour members in “a political time warp”.
None of this should surprise. The establishment liberalism of The Economist meshed well with the radical centrism that dominated the West from the end of the Cold War through to the mid-2010s.
But this status quo liberalism was on the brink of collapse by 2015. Brexit and Trump showed that the old rules no longer applied.
Once again, The Economist was caught off guard and couldn’t quite accept this crisis of liberal legitimacy as the beginning of a new normal.
After supporting the Conservatives in two elections, The Economist switched to supporting the Liberal Democrats in response to Brexit and the rise of Corbynism, backing the party in 2017 and 2019.
Neither endorsement produced electoral gains.
By 2024, the publication was back to supporting Labour for the first time in over a decade, but, more importantly, it was back on the side of the British government.
The Labour Party was again deemed “safe’ by the financial press, though only after Starmer’s purge of leftists from the party.
The Economist’s support of Labour now is worse than when it sided with Tony Blair’s government, famously featuring a cover of him grinning, wearing Margaret Thatcher’s hair and lipstick in 2001.
Back then, it instructed readers to “vote conservative” but choose the ambiguous right-winger rather than the feeble one.” This editorial line wouldn’t change until 2010 when The Economist returned to its Tory loyalties.
Where The Economist will turn next is hard to say. Labour looks doomed. Reform UK and the Tories are far too reactionary and demagogic for its editors.
The Lib Dems might be its natural home, once again.
Dead Centre
The situation today is nothing like it was in the early 2000s when The Economist was part of a political consensus which embraced globalisation.
Then, the centre ground was defined as fiscally conservative, socially liberal and prepared to go to war for the market. Nowadays, the periodical runs articles suggesting the UK never carried out real austerity.
It’s not that The Economist is blind to what’s really happening. It’s that the editors can’t see a way forward beyond their own ideological framework.
Many of us suffer from this same problem. Britain might be on the brink of a right-wing realignment on the scale of Thatcher’s 1979 election victory.
The old centrists of British politics are now locked outside of the two-party system. The days of just switching from Tory to Labour and back again might be over.
The United States is maintaining its duopoly, except that the Republicans no longer resemble a conservative party of any kind. They’ve become a personality cult based on the MAGA insurgency, the party of The Donald and no one else.
Meanwhile, the Democrats appear more irrelevant than ever in Trump’s America.
It’s unclear where the party will turn, but the progressive neoliberalism of the Obama-Clinton years has clearly run out of gas.
It’s hard to see how The Economist’s historical commitment to laissez-faire policies fits with the dynamics in either country.
Likewise, the European situation doesn’t look much better, with the Macron presidency failing to deliver even on its own terms, while the French far right is waiting in the shadows.
Similarly, the Christian Democrats in Germany have updated themselves as a nationalist party. Meanwhile, Alternative für Deutschland is stronger than ever.
The old global order is dying, giving way to a populist world, where the nostrums of free trade at all cost no longer elicit much support.
The Economist remains the weekly publication for Davos Man. However, he has never been more politically unaligned than now.
Photograph courtesy of Number 10. Published under a Creative Commons license.
