How 'Neoliberalism' Became the Left's Favorite Insult of Liberals - By Jonathan Chait
July 16, 2017
8:00 pm
A generation ago, “neoliberalism” was the chosen label of a handful of moderately liberal opinion journalists, centered around Charles Peters, then-editor of the Washington Monthly. Some neoliberals started calling traditional liberals “paleoliberals.” The magazine most closely associated with traditional liberal thinking was The American Prospect, which gave me my first job out of college.
When I started there, I asked one of the editors, Paul Starr, about the still-roiling schism between the neos and the paleos. (I never felt comfortable with either label.) Starr told me he disdained the term because it was “an attempt to win an argument by using an epithet.” What he meant — and I think he was right — was that “paleoliberal” was not a self-identification any of its adherents used, but a term of disparagement. The neolibs were claiming to own the future and consigning their adversaries to the past.
The neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s has faded into memory, as its adherents failed to settle on a coherent set of principles other than a general posture of counterintuitive skepticism. (Peters’s new ideological manifesto, We Do Our Part, only mentions neoliberalism once.) But the term has been used to mean different things at different times, and it has returned to American political discourse with a vengeance. Then, as now, it is an attempt to win an argument with an epithet. Only this time, it is neoliberal that is the term of abuse.
And the term neoliberal doesn’t mean a faction of liberals. It now refers to liberals generally, and it is applied by their left-wing critics. The word is now ubiquitous, popping up in almost any socialist polemic against the Democratic Party or the center-left. Obama’s presidency? It was “the last gasp of neoliberalism.” Why did Hillary Clinton lose? It was her neoliberalism. Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz? Neoliberals both.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/how-neoliberalism-became-the-lefts-favorite-insult.html
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http://k7moa.com/political_polarization_2014.htm
Democrats have not moved to the right since FDR, despite all the false memes floating around.
"This chart indicates that Democrats have not moved right since the New Deal era at all. Indeed, the party has moved somewhat to the left, largely because its conservative Southern wing has disappeared.
Now, the Poole-Rosenthal measure does not end the discussion. No metric can perfectly measure something as inherently abstract as a public philosophy. One obvious limit of this measure is its value over long periods of time, when issue sets change in ways that make comparisons difficult. The Poole-Rosenthal graph has special difficulty comparing the Democratic Party before and after the New Deal. But it does raise the question of why the Democrats’ supposed U-turn away from social democracy does not appear anywhere in the data.
Any remotely close look at the historical record, as opposed to a romanticized memory of uncompromised populists of yore, yields the same conclusion as the numbers. The idea that the Democratic Party used to stand for undiluted economic populism in its New Deal heyday is characteristic of the nostalgia to which the party faithful are prone — no present-day politician can ever live up to the imagined greatness of the statesmen of past."
