The Shock Doctrine Returns: Crisis as the Path to Project 2025

From Friedman to Trump: Neoliberalism’s Authoritarian Afterlife

Milton Friedman never imagined himself as the architect of authoritarianism. He saw himself as a defender of freedom, but freedom defined in the narrowest way: the right to buy, sell, and consume without interference from the state. To him, democracy wasn’t the point. The market was. His followers—the Chicago Boys in Chile most famously—put that creed into practice in moments of crisis. When a coup, a crash, or hyperinflation shocked a country, they moved fast and pushed through changes so sweeping that no opposition could gather in time. Privatization, deregulation, and cuts to public services were sold as “efficiency.” In practice they shifted power upward, stripped away collective protections, and made resistance harder.

Friedman’s vision was radical not only in policy but in its moral frame. Government, he argued, should protect property, enforce contracts, and keep money stable. Everything else—schools, healthcare, social security, even disaster relief—was an intrusion. Public goods were reframed as private choices: education as a voucher, retirement as a personal account, disaster recovery as a business opportunity. Freedom, in this model, meant freedom for capital. It gave cover to roll back labor rights, weaken unions, and turn the state into a shield for wealth rather than a tool for sharing it. For decades these ideas were exported through the IMF, the World Bank, and U.S. policy, remaking economies from Latin America to Eastern Europe.

That same DNA runs through Project 2025. The plan for a second Trump term isn’t gradual reform. It’s shock therapy. Fire large numbers of career civil servants. Strip the agencies that protect health, labor, and the environment. Hand key decisions to loyalists and private contractors. Education, healthcare, disaster response—treated not as public goods but as profit centers. The goal isn’t to tinker at the edges. It’s to break the state’s capacity, quickly, before resistance can organize.

Where Project 2025 goes further than Friedman is in the fusion of market fundamentalism with culture war politics. Friedman didn’t care much about abortion, religion, or gender rules. He focused on markets. The architects of Project 2025 have grafted a theocratic agenda onto his economic skeleton. Markets without restraints. Authoritarian governance to enforce it. Culture war to divide the public while the restructuring takes place.

History makes the pattern plain. In Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay in the 1970s, neoliberal reforms were inseparable from repression. Slashing social spending and privatizing pensions were deeply unpopular. They required coups, states of siege, detention centers, torture, and disappearances. In Yeltsin’s Russia, repression was less spectacular but no less real: chaotic privatization protected by security forces, mass disenfranchisement, oligarchs looting public assets, police breaking strikes and protests. In each case, democracy was treated as a hurdle to clear, not a value to keep.

Look at the United States now and the echoes are hard to miss. The mobilization of National Guard units into civic roles, the growth of detention infrastructure, the steady expansion of executive power under the language of “emergency”—all of it builds the scaffolding needed to push through unpopular changes and contain dissent. The difference is style. Here repression is more likely to wear a legal mask: executive orders, selective prosecutions, and friendly courts, rather than tanks in the streets. Authoritarianism by procedure.

None of this is accidental. In the shock doctrine playbook, repression isn’t a bug; it’s a requirement. Shock policies don’t survive a functioning democracy. They rely on fragmented opposition, weakened unions, purged civil services, and the fear that speaking out will bring retaliation. We’re already hearing it in the open: talk of “retribution,” talk of a “purge.” The search of John Bolton’s home reads less like routine law enforcement than a signal. The Department of Justice and the FBI can be turned, as they were under J. Edgar Hoover, into instruments of political policing rather than neutral law. Enemies stop being defined by crimes and start being defined by opposition to the leader.

This is not new in the United States. The Palmer Raids rounded up immigrants and radicals in the name of security. Hoover’s FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr., infiltrated civil rights and antiwar groups, and ran COINTELPRO to disrupt lawful organizing. Nixon kept an enemies list and used the IRS to punish critics. What’s new now is the scale and speed of the plan to make such abuses routine, and to present them as normal governance.

So what can be done to stop it? We cannot rely only on the very institutions being hollowed out, or on elections run under a cloud of suppression and gerrymandering, or on a single leader to fix what is systemic. History suggests the only durable counter to shock politics is solidarity that reaches beyond a news cycle: unions, neighborhoods, professional associations, faith communities, city and tribal governments—everyday structures that tie people together and make it possible to resist.

We can already see pieces of that resistance. Workers in logistics and service industries are organizing unions despite fierce pushback, proving that solidarity can grow even in hostile workplaces. Mutual aid networks that kept communities alive during the pandemic still move food, shelter, and medicine where government fails. Cities and several states are pressing ahead with climate policy and public health protections, refusing to wait for federal permission. Indigenous nations are asserting sovereignty in the courts and on the ground, halting or rerouting pipelines and building renewable projects of their own. None of these efforts alone are enough. Together they sketch a strategy: build local resilience where federal protections are being stripped, create overlapping layers of support where top-down control tries to divide, and invest in institutions of memory and accountability that can survive political storms.

That is what makes them powerful. Friedman defined freedom as the absence of collective ties. Project 2025 defines power as the ability to purge those ties. Both assume people will stay isolated and disoriented. The antidote is to prove them wrong. Rediscover freedom in common action. Strengthen the bonds across workplaces, towns, tribes, and movements. Refuse the loneliness that authoritarianism feeds on. The shock doctrine thrives on confusion and despair. The way through it is clarity, solidarity, and persistence.

Suggested Readings

Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park. Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital Across the Last Millennium. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.

Heyman, Josiah McC. “States and Illegal Practices.” In States and Illegal Practices, edited by Josiah McC. Heyman, 1–24. Oxford: Berg, 1999.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Weaver, Thomas, James B. Greenberg, Anne Browning, and William Alexander, eds. Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico: Structures, Struggles, and Futures.Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012.