Geography Concepts: A Personal View

  Rollover Neoliberalism: Extending Market Rule Beyond the Roll-Back/Roll-Out State in the Trump Era David McKay Abstract This paper revisits the well-known “roll-back/roll-out” framework of neoliberalization and proposes a related extension: rollover neoliberalism . If roll-back describes the dismantling of Keynesian/social-democratic protections and roll-out describes the building of new market-conforming institutions, rollover names a later tendency: neoliberal logics spilling into domains that were not previously central battlegrounds of market rule —a kind of “map rolling” beyond its old edges. Rollover neoliberalism is not merely privatization or deregulation; it is the proliferation of market metrics, contracting, quasi-markets, risk scoring, and managerial discipline into spheres such as immigration detention, platform-mediated work, digital information ecosystems, and administrative governance itself. The paper argues that Trump-era governance—across the first term (20...

You are standing in a parking lot in Minnesota in January, which is basically nature’s way of saying, “Sure, humans invented civilization, but I still own the thermostat.” A delivery truck idles nearby, exhaling little clouds like a bored dragon. A driver in a neon vest tosses a cardboard box onto a dolly. The box is ordinary. Brown. Anonymous. It could contain socks, a blender, a book about the fall of empires, or—because we live in the strangest timeline—an inflatable T. rex costume. It doesn’t matter what’s inside. Because the box itself is the story. Not the cardboard box—the other one. The box you never see. A steel rectangle, the size of a small room, that has quietly rearranged the planet. And to see how, you have to follow the box backwards. So: the truck. Why does the truck exist as an organism in North America’s ecosystem? Because the highway exists. And the highway exists because, in the mid-20th century, a bunch of governments decided to pour money into roads the w...