Yanis Varoufakis's talk of "technofeudalism" would be relevant here too (link below).
I'm intrigued by your dismissal of the free-marketeer's appeal to naturalness. You construe that as a rhetorical device. I've argued that modern economics is a pseudoscience, so I'd be open to that deflationary hypothesis. Indeed, the neoclassical economists' comparison of "efficient" economies to Newtonian systems was bogus and merely rhetorical.
But would you deny that there are natural power dynamics that make for some continuity between the prevalence of ancient feudal arrangements (gross concentrations of power, such as we see even in dominance hierarchies throughout the "animal kingdom"), and the modern fragility of the New Deal or of other egalitarian or socialist societies? Egalitarianism had its heyday in the Stone Age when we had to pull our weight to survive in small bands of foragers. Even in those groups, though, there was likely a division of labour between the hunters and the gatherers, between men and women. That led eventually to the split between goddess worship in the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, and the more patriarchal religions that characterized the later civilized period we're still in.
What was the difference between animals' dominance hierarchies (which concentrated power in the alpha ruler, the animal equivalent of the aristocrat), and the more egalitarian human groups of prehistory? Behaviourally modern early humans had cultural ideals to inspire them, and little physical strength to protect them from the wild. Early people had to rely on their intelligence and creativity, which enabled them to bypass the natural principle of oligarchy, of the centralization of social power for the sake of managing a complex group. Creative intelligence enabled them to bypass, too, that principle's pitfall, which is the empowered leader's likely corruption.
Arguably, then, civilizations fall back into the animalistic swing of things (such as into neofeudal economies), because our societies have outgrown our ability to manage them with mere cultural ideals. We fall back on natural norms, contrary to our progressive aspirations.
Now, I'm not prescribing that appeal to nature as an antidote to progressive humanism. On the contrary, I repudiate conservatism as an unsustainable form of thinking. But there's a kernel of truth here, isn't there? Nature does pose such challenges to our attempt to depart from animality with progressive societies.
