Troubling ‘Post-Neoliberalism’: Coalitional governance and contradiction in Chicago

Extending debates on post-neoliberalism, new municipalism, and urban governance, this article examines how left post-neoliberal projects unfold at the municipal scale as contested practices of governing under constraint. Drawing on qualitative analysis of two contemporary campaigns in Chicago – Treatment Not Trauma and Bring Chicago Home – it analyzes how coalitions seek to institutionalize logics of care, redistribution, and public provision within a municipal state shaped by racialized neoliberal restructuring. Tracing how movement-generated visions travel across political arenas, encounter institutional limits, and are continually renegotiated, the analysis foregrounds constraint, compromise, and disagreement as constitutive features of governing within and against neoliberal institutions, and shows how race and anti-Blackness structure the possibilities and limits of post-neoliberal and municipal projects. Rather than treating contradiction as evidence of failure or co-optation, the article argues that neoliberalism's contradictions constitute the terrain on which post-neoliberal articulations are practiced. In doing so, it advances a relational and racialized account of post-neoliberalism as an uneven practice of municipal governance, one that reframes how we interpret the strategic horizons available to left actors operating within neoliberalized states.