Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America (with Mehrsa Baradaran)
Nov 25, 2025
Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, an expert on banking law and inequality, joins the conversation to discuss the pervasive influence of neoliberalism. She describes how this ideology restructured our legal and political systems, turning them into tools for capital over democracy. Baradaran connects neoliberalism's roots to racial inequality and highlights how it operates like an algorithm, fueling systemic economic disparities. She proposes community-centered investment solutions to combat these entrenched issues, drawing from her own experiences.
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Neoliberalism Is Anti‑Majoritarian
- Early neoliberal thinkers openly argued democracy threatened elite interests.
- Baradaran highlights figures who framed taxation and majority rule as threats to elites.
Race As A Tool To Divide Workers
- Race has been used as a political weapon to break class solidarity and defend elite power.
- Baradaran links civil rights expansion to a neoliberal backlash using racial division.
Capital As An Insatiable Algorithm
- Capital behaves like an autonomous algorithm that demands perpetual growth.
- Baradaran warns that unleashed capital runs on debt, exploitation, and extraction like a metastatic machine.
