Ten years after the financial crisis and subsequent global recession, the decades-old grip of neoliberal ideology is coming loose in the political and economic center of the system built under its auspices.

Though the crisis and recession were quite obviously global in scale, they produced a particular political outcome in the Arab world; that of regime-destabilizing mass movements. The Arab Spring uprisings and the most recent political repudiations of neoliberalism in the First World – part of the same wider ongoing process in which the international economic and political order of the past 40 years, characterized by American political dominance internationally and neoliberal ideological hegemony – may be coming to end.

In 2011, the mass of people in the Arab world made their demands explicitly in these terms; they called for the fall of their countries’ regimes and economic systems. The Arab political scene had been revitalized after decades of stagnation.

Many on the left saw great potential in these developments and hoped that achieving liberal democracy would be a first step towards materializing those demands; that, given the chance, the mass of people would vote to dismantle the structures that were maintaining American dominance in the Arab world and reverse the neoliberal economic policies that so characterizes its economies.

The setbacks suffered by Arab revolution since then are undeniably deep. Seven years into the revolution, that fiery articulation of political and economic demands has been subsumed by the same ideological binary that characterized the Arab states before the revolutions; that of secular authoritarianism and its Islamist critique.

That the revolutions ultimately failed to transcend this decades-old political stagnation is the central tragedy – not only a product of the social and economic problems caused by neoliberalism, as many have argued, but of the way neoliberalism functions as an ideology.