Thomas Mann House | 7 p.m. (PT)

The 1990s ended, some say, in 2016 with the first election of Donald Trump – which means that ever since, we have been living in an interregnum. In order to grasp the present rupture, we need to understand the forces that shaped the last political order, or, as the historian Gary Gerstle calls it, the “neoliberal order:” the 1990s with their combination of free trade, deregulation, a technological revolution, and the promise of “lifting all boats.”

The election results in 2024 can be read as an even more forceful pushback against this order. But what generated this pushback? What unleashed this illiberal energy and created the inequality at the core of so many political developments today? How exactly does this connect to the 1990s, this decade still perceived as a honeymoon with history, until something went terribly wrong? The story of the 1990s, as it turns out, rests on a lot of false assumptions, willful amnesia, and a strategic naiveté that is now collapsing in plain sight.

In a panel discussion hosted by Honorary Fellow Georg Diez, the guests will discuss the role and failed promises of the 1990s in shaping our political present, and how the central idea of the 90s – that markets come first and democracy comes second – would eventually lead to a democratic decline and a loss of a sense of agency among a populace which is ready to take it back. Or are they?

Attendance by invitation only.

Participants

Georg Diez is an author and journalist and currently a fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen and at ProjectTogether in Berlin, where he researches on democratic innovation. He previously worked as editor-in-chief of The New Institute, as a columnist for Spiegel Online, and for the feature sections of Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. For 2024, he is preparing an exhibition at Hamburg's Deichtorhallen entitled Survival in the 21st Century. Georg Diez lives in Berlin and Stockholm.

Lily Geismer is Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. Geismer’s research and teaching focuses on 20th century political and urban history in the United States, especially liberalism and the Democratic Party. She is the author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (PublicAffairs, 2022), and Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton University Press, 2015). She is also co-editor of Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and her work has appeared in the Journal of American History, The New York Times, among others. 

Karin Pettersson is the Culture Editor of Aftonbladet, Scandinavia's biggest daily newspaper, and one of Sweden's most well-known journalists. She has a long background in journalism and politics, having founded leading news magazine Fokus, as well as worked at the Ministry of Finance as a political advisor. She is an economist by training, with a MSc from Stockholm School of Economics, and a 2017 Nieman Fellow from Harvard University.