In 2024, anger over rising prices helped return Donald Trump to the White House. Two years later, Trump’s war with Iran has sent fuel costs soaring, threatening his party’s control of Congress. A president who benefited from the public’s frustration with inflation has inflicted another price shock on voters.
For economist Isabella Weber, the political consequences should come as no surprise. In Anti-Fascist Economics, she argues that governments that fail to prioritize the economic needs of ordinary people invite a backlash against democracy itself. From Weimar Germany to the COVID-19 pandemic, she traces how rising prices for essentials can erode faith in democratic institutions and create openings for the far right. Her prescription is not simply for governments to spend more, but to make affordability their organizing principle.
That argument could sound like a familiar progressive indictment of neoliberalism, the governing philosophy that treats market outcomes as largely beyond the reach of democratic politics. Weber does not equate neoliberalism with fascism: early champions of market liberalism, including Friedrich Hayek, saw it as a defense against authoritarianism. But by placing so many economic decisions beyond democratic intervention, she argues, this orthodoxy has “normalized the acceptance of mass suffering.” A government that tells voters it is powerless to relieve hardship should not be surprised when they turn against it. Weber’s most provocative target, however, isn’t a free-market conservative. It’s Joe Biden.
Biden declared his economic agenda to be a break with the orthodoxies of the previous four decades. His administration invested in domestic manufacturing, strengthened antitrust enforcement, and used industrial policy to accelerate the transition to clean energy. By many measures, Bidenomics represented exactly the kind of muscular government Weber favors. The Inflation Reduction Act, in particular, rejected the notion that government should leave major economic transitions to the private sector. Yet the voters who endured the inflation of his presidency elected Trump anyway. Why?
Weber’s answer is that Biden’s team failed to confront inflation with the same willingness to challenge conventional economics that they demonstrated elsewhere. Officials understood that pandemic disruptions had constrained supplies and driven up prices, she argues, but largely waited for markets to adjust rather than intervening directly to shield consumers in the short term. “What [they] did was a big deal,” she writes of Biden’s broader agenda. Yet on inflation, “there was still a hangover from Reaganomics.”
In December 2021, Weber herself proposed an alternative. Writing in The Guardian, she called for strategic price controls on essential goods. When a supply shock prevents producers from quickly making more of something, she reasoned, letting prices rise won’t necessarily induce additional production. Indeed, she notes, firms have little incentive to repair supply chains when shortages give them cover to increase their margins—a phenomenon later labeled “greedflation.” In highly concentrated markets, she noted, “the question is now whether prices are fixed but who fixes the prices.” Temporary controls, she argued, could have checked powerful corporations’ pricing power, allowing the government to protect households while it repaired supply chains and addressed shortages.
“The reaction,” Weber recalls, “was monstrous.” Economists treat even narrowly targeted controls as an attack on the price signals that make markets work. Weber saw in their response the limits of an economic orthodoxy that had come to regard government intervention as more dangerous than the hardship it might prevent. As she puts it, “a proposal to fix a few key prices as a means of last resort in an emergency is read as an attempt to abolish markets altogether.”
She argues that the Biden administration made the same mistake. By failing to protect families from soaring prices, Democrats turned an economic emergency into a political one. Inflation eventually cooled, and the administration could point to investment and job growth; voters were still paying more for necessities. Weber points to other examples in history as a warning about what prolonged hardship can do to faith in democratic government. Hitler, for example, gained popularity as an anti-austerity crusader after Germany’s Weimar government opted to maintain a balanced budget rather than protect starving workers. For Biden, “letting inflation ripple through our economies […] while waiting for the shocks to peter out,” she writes, “was playing with the survival of democracy.”
Weber makes a persuasive case that affordability is a democratic imperative. Whether or not her policy prescriptions could have changed the 2024 election, she raises important questions about whether, during a shortage, prices remain the most equitable way for society to distribute essentials. As wars and climate change increase the likelihood of supply shocks for fuel and food, the time is ripe for discussion about the full range of policy actions at governments’ disposal.
Still, Weber’s ambitions extend beyond emergency price controls. She wants governments to organize economic policy around reliable access to food, housing, healthcare, energy, and other essentials for people “whose material security is not guaranteed by wealth.” She urges policymakers to seek early, visible successes that build support for more ambitious reforms. Given her focus on supply shock risks, she presents toolkits for food and energy markets that include public options, buffer stocks that can be released during shortages, and limits on profiteering in crises. These are instruments, not an all-purpose formula: each sector of the economy, she recognizes, will need a bespoke industrial strategy that draws on the expertise of other economic policy fields. Child and elder care, for example, offer an especially clear example of how public funding can increase access, raise wages, and improve quality in services that private markets often leave unaffordable.
She sees a kindred approach in New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s affordability agenda, including his proposal for city-run grocery stores. But Weber’s broader argument has implications far beyond any one city or policy. Democrats need to deliver improvements that people can feel, she contends, and do so before disillusionment hardens into support for the far right. The challenge is turning attractive promises into services that actually work. A city-run grocery store, for example, is a proposal, not yet proof that the government can deliver cheaper food. The book gives Democrats a standard to aim for; applying it across very different markets will be the harder task.
There is also a complication: Trump has hardly been a doctrinaire free-marketeer himself. His administration has shown considerable willingness to intervene in the economy, using tariffs, government contracts, and regulatory favors to reward allies and punish opponents. Weber argues that fascism and neoliberalism share a belief in competition and inequality as natural features of society. What distinguishes the authoritarian version is not a reluctance to use state power, but the ends it serves. Under Trump, government can steer resources toward favored businesses while threatening disfavored groups with investigations or the loss of public support. That is a far cry from making economic security a universal obligation.
That distinction gives the book its most useful political challenge. Democrats cannot convincingly defend democracy by promising only better economic management or the restoration of rules Trump has broken. Nor, as Trump has demonstrated, is government intervention inherently progressive. The far right’s embrace of tariffs, government stakes in businesses, and other once-unfashionable tools may even make voters more suspicious of economic activism itself. But the answer cannot be to declare those tools off-limits. Democrats must show how government power can be used transparently and accountably to make necessities more affordable, rather than enrich friends or punish enemies—and to protect people from the next shock.
One test of that distinction will be artificial intelligence. AI raises different problems from the price shocks at the center of Weber’s analysis, but it increasingly shapes people’s access to work, information, and essential services. In tech, as in the inflation debate, policymakers are often warned that intervention will stifle innovation. Companies are left to define acceptable risks, even as their products threaten jobs, privacy, and public trust. Weber’s framework suggests a different question: Are these technologies improving ordinary people’s lives? For Democrats, answering it would mean stronger public oversight, safeguards for workers and consumers, and accountability when companies cause harm. That will be difficult while Trump’s administration favors powerful tech allies and weakens regulators. But leaving AI’s future entirely to its developers would repeat the very deference to markets Weber condemns.
