https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/informit.664880332032803

It has become something of a cliche to note that since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, we have been living through an interregnum in which 'the old system is dying but the new cannot yet be born' (Gramsci 1935: 572). The Coronavirus Crash of 2020 has redoubled the seriousness of our conjunctural moment in ways that may only be fully comprehensible by the middle of the next decade. Critics of neoliberalism were quick to assume that the 2008 crash would signal its immediate dissolution. Keynesian economists boasted that the fiscal stimulus measures adopted by governments and their central banks around the world indicated that a new progressive alternative would shortly replace it (Krugman 2009: 1). Crouch wrote of 'The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism' (2011: 23). Bruff (2014) coined the phrase 'authoritarian neoliberalism' to describe the phenomenon whereby, in the era of fiscal austerity in the 2010s, the system's innately coercive, disciplinary and panoptic tendencies have had to be imposed through significantly escalated scales of state violence. The latter has been evidenced by augmented police militarisation, mass incarceration, the conflation of protest with forms of low-level terrorism, and the widening presence of riot police across urban space (Elahe 2017; Balko 2013: 162; Wood 2014: 15). A few years later, Jaffe (2017: 1) compellingly framed Hillary Clinton's doomed 2016 presidential campaign as a toxic form of 'Zombie Neoliberalism'. This gothic imagery depicted how neoliberalism was characterised by a profound legitimacy crisis amongst large swathes of the masses, yet rambled on regardless due to this crisis not being as visible by elites. Then along came COVID-19.