＃７１

As the authorship of one great politicoeconomik playbook dwindled, the foreword was being written of another. Thus far, the 21st century had been the ouevre of primarily Rovian architects, breastfed on the faux-reluctant pragmatic governance that Klein et al. had termed ‘disaster capitalism’. Volume I: on the Keynesian boons of war for the military-industrial complex. Volume II: on the conflation of recession with economic red tape. And so on. By 2040, virtually all neoliberal statesmen perched comfortably on the same Overton windowsill, waiting serenely for this or that disaster to allow a long-overdue yanking back of the progressivism they'd so far conceded - the bread and circuses of the modern day.

Haskinger brought something new. Arguably, he was the first to recognise that this shock doctrine was by now so ingrained, so instinctive to a dormant proletariat, that all pretense of ideological opposition against it could safely be dropped. Without wholly abandoning the former playbook, Haskinger's administration prototyped a corollary to it that quickly occupied most of his attention and energy. Where disaster capitalism had slyly advanced corporate interests on the coattails of global crisis, Haskinger set about designing markets that seemed certain to manifest such crises down the line (provided they were sufficiently protected from the occasional populist intervention).

Even by his third term, the proliferation of personal biologicals was unambiguously Haskinger's pièce de résistance. Designer prokaryotic weapons packaged the immediate lethality of a gun with the subtlety of a polonium-tipped umbrella, and once available to the market, proved impossible to expunge for fears of prohibitionist flashbacks and “good guy with a gun”-style refrains. A favourable (and very likely bribed) 7-2 Supreme Court decision bought Haskinger enough time to pass skeleton legislation regulating their trade - signalling his administration's friendliness to the market by very virtue of the implausibility of the legislation's monitoring and enforcement measures. By the time the Supreme Court overturned its judgement, all appetite for the earlier ban had gone, and the market persisted through its own raw inertia and a burgeoning Second Amendment vanguard.

Just seven years later, the inevitable breakout of melanin-based biologicals (which we now know Haskinger's advisers had readily foreseen) reignited wars through Oman and the former UAE. Haskinger's technical and ideological successor, Lorme Mallory, seized the opportunity to prohibit all individual trade through the region unless facilitated by a megacorporate proxy. In this way, the new capitalism beget crisis that itself fostered the new capitalism. This wondrous and overtly premeditated bootstrapping of pure capital power into existence clearly captured the imagination of many, and would become the dominant politicoeconomik modality for the remainder of the 21st.