and has no single valid definition.

To my face. I don't think they think it means the same thing as I think it means. I'm the closest thing to a socialist and definitely am Not a neo-liberal. But the way Trump suckers use it is similar to how we use neo-Nazis.

... and sometimes ‘neocon’ interchangeably
to describe those who don’t subscribe
100% to ‘progressive’ dogma.

Well, maybe Third Way people.

There are three basic ideas in neoliberalism.

The first idea is to deregulate to free up the market to operate 'naturally' because the assumption is it knows best and operates best when free from government interference.

The second idea is to privatize everything we can, again because of the assumption that the market can do it better, faster and cheaper than government.

The last, third, pillar is to gut the New Deal, or more specifically end non-military discretionary spending, and cut off the so-called 'entitlement' programs like Social Security, SSI, SSDI, as well as other safety nets like unemployment insurance, SNAP, TANF, Pell Grants, Perkins funding and all the rest.

Some corollaries:
- The only 'legitimate' role of the federal government is national defense, and states need to be responsible for everything else. This concept is called 'devolution' and has been around for some time.

- The national government needs to be starved through tax cuts and funding cuts until it is, as Grover Norquist has advocated, 'small enough to drown in a bathtub.'

- Neoliberalism upholds shareholder primacy, naturally supports monopolies (which is what you get when you deregulate), Wall Street and its increasingly predatory practices (consider the so-called 'private equity' firms that go in, do hostile takeovers, bankrupt companies and then sell their assets to enrich a few while leaving a trail of ruined communities and lives).

Basically neoliberals have swung the pendulum too far toward the market and too far away from responsible government that provides the regulation necessary to mitigate the natural evils that will arise in a more pure form of capitalism; things like binding arbitration for employees and consumers so they cannot sue, corporations making the decision to suffer the settlements from known dangers in their products because that is cheaper than fixing the problem, and thus better for shareholder profits. Things like busting unions, driving wages down, gobbling up pensions illegally.

Remember Ross Perot? He told us that NAFTA would make a 'giant sucking sound' as jobs left the US for Mexico and other places where wages are cheaper. Well, with neoliberalism, we hear the same giant sucking sound, but it is the sound of wealth being transferred to fewer and fewer people at the expense of the rest of us.

Neoliberalism has nothing to do with Democrats, and everything to do with a pure 'free market' i.e. unrestrained capitalism.

I don't know why it is called neoliberalism. Because it isn't liberal in any sense in which I think of that term.

Now, last thing - we need to differentiate between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Neoconservatives such as Rumsfeld and Rice and Cheney advocated an American Empire. This is why they had no exit plan after invading Iraq based on lies about WMDs. Neoliberals are tend to be globalists who pay lip service to nation states but believe the market does and should transcend them.

Wonder why Elizabeth Warren was so down on the TPP? It was the ISDS provisions, which she felt gave corporations far too much leverage against national, state and local governments (a company can sue a government in an international tribunal based on profits foregone due to 'excessive' regulation, and the government would have to subject itself to binding arbitration by arbitrators who are themselves paid for by the corporations - you can see this in action if you read up on the lawsuits brought by the oil and gas companies against the US government over profits lost due to our not building the Keystone Pipeline). This is the concept - that the market should be more powerful than governments.

So there you have it. A crash course in neoliberalism courtesy of PatrickforO, an unabashed member of the progressive wing of the party!

the extreme left of the party (or so far left they don't consider themselves members of the party) to smear Democrats who aren't that far left as insufficiently pure.

had a different meaning in the past but now it's mostly a slur against moderate Democrats.

I tried, and they have no clue. In its current form, the term is used by the radical left as a catch-all derogatory phrase favored by the bomb throwers to undermine those Democrats who actually know how to advance a progressive agenda.

And indeed, it has nothing to do with the Democrats. I attempted, on many occasions, to drive this point to those who routinely apply this term to the center-left Democrats, but they all uniformly dismissed my attempts without as much as giving their own definition.

BTW, liberalism in the 18th century used to denote free market capitalism. It was a pretty liberal idea at the time of feudal despots. Neo-liberalism is a 19th century interpretation of classical free market liberalism. Of course, either one is no longer applicable to multinational corporatism that controls markets today, since the markets are not free by any definition.

Pro free trade. Privatization. Austerity. Deregulation.

Things espoused by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

But with Trump trumpeting 'fake news!' every other tweet, and censoring scientists so they cannot say certain words or use certain terms, it is not surprising that we're moving into an age of Orwellian Newspeak.

only one accepted definition of the term anymore. As least not in general usage. Do political scientists agree on one definition?

it's currently being used as an epithet by Democrats (or left-of-Democrats) to attack some Democrats in the primaries.

pro-free trade, globalism, and deregulation. But it’s used inappropriately by the far left of the party to describe more centrist Democrats that they disagree with.

It's the third in a 4-part series, but it stands on its own okay.

even included my favorite quote on neo liberalism ….

"there is no alternative" thatcher

At some point, all of the democratic candidates will be accused by their opponents' supporters as being neoliberal.

Here's a good explainer on the term, though:

by some right-wing spin master to be picked up by very liberal Democrats to be used against other Democrats. I hate the term. It is only used to create chaos and discord within the party.

......believe in a less regulated free-market than liberals and tag liberals as socialists, when said liberals say that Capitalism, whom bitter experience has taught is cancerous to the entire economy, when not well regulated.

NAFTA, 3rd way, not raising taxes as high as they need to be on corporations and the uber-rich, taking too much corporate money for campaigns and being therefore beholden, opposing single payer universal health care, so-called "welfare reform" etc---these are the neo-liberals.

Unrecognizable to Democrats before the 1980's. You've heard of the DLC perhaps? As the Repugs moved hard right, the neo-liberals Dems are seen as becoming Republican-lite. Everyone moved to the right after Reagan.

the definition of neo-liberal hasn't changed but the number of Democrats who have embraced neo-liberalism grew after St. Reagan.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Puritopian

a modified form of liberalism tending to favor free-market capitalism. Now free market capitalism has transformed to unfettered capitalism in this country and no liberal would back that, so, since there is no such thing as free market capitalism, there is no longer any neoliberals.

I would even venture to say that traditional neo-liberals, and even more so Third Way democrats (another derogatory term rendered meaningless by the left-wing radicals) see themselves as advocates of the return to the free markets which are now controlled by what libertarians call "crony capitalism" - the predominant kind of capitalism being currently practiced all across the world.

I would further venture to say that neo-liberals see regulation that restrain crony capitalism to be the only way to protect free market economy from being completely dismantled by (forgive me for an awkward paraphrase) the small government-big business complex.

at Democrats who are really in the center, issue wise.

I consider myself an FDR Democrat, I guess that means you consider me a left wing radical?

attributing the use of "neo-liberal" and "third way" in derogatory fashion to them.

But since you have attributed to me a definition that couldn't be further from what I had in mind, let me make this clear: my definition of a left wing radical would be an impractical ideologue who acts out (more often in rhetoric than in deeds) utopian ideals as if they have a snowflake's chance in hell in achieving the goals they espouse to. More often than not, they have zero record of accomplishment, and their actions produce results opposite to what they claim they want to achieve. Personalities like Thom Hartmann, Cenk Uygur and Susan Sarandon come to mind. Putin calls them "useful idiots".

FDR saved capitalism by regulating the hell out of it, but he was a capitalist.

I generally think the term has become a slur and has an ambiguous meaning. But lately I see it being used by leftist who dislike capitalism to describe those on the left who do.

Some of them would use the term for FDR since he regulated capitalism rather than nationalize it.

My reading anyway. Others no doubt disagree.

Like her, I too consider myself a New Deal Democrat, and am sad at how those values, the values that saved millions from starvation, arguably helped end the Great Depression, and ushered in over two decades of postwar prosperity in this nation, where unions were strong, tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations were high, Wall Street was well regulated, and the American middle class was strong, the envy of the world, are now denigrated on here and called 'radical.'

Yes, I know people of color were treated unequally then, as they are now, and we've got to do better, but under Trump and his neoliberal masters, we are going the wrong way really, really fast. Like a roller coaster ride.

The New Deal was good policy then, and would be a good policy now - a Green one even better.

essentially unrestrained free markets, privatized government services, deregulation, lower taxes esp for corporations and the rich.

its purer forms were imposed in latin America by American backed juntas and dictators such as Pinochet. American citizens have generally resisted the extreme austerity of neo liberalism but our "elites" are always reducing and privatizing the little that remains of our safety net.

it is easy to determine which democrats tend to neoliberalism by their membership in the dlc, the third way, or the 3rd way think tank "center for American progress." all republicans, however "populist" are neo liberal (rebranded by Reagans pr team as "supply side&quot

was this our basic disagreement in 2016? one of them for sure.

It’s an economic ideology, not political. Neoliberal theory is embraced by both Republicans and Democrats (neoconservativism is more focused on foreign policy)

That said, neoliberalism is a failed ideology, as the past 35-40 years of market economics has shown with the explosion of income inequality.

I won’t vote for any democratic primary candidate with a whiff of neoliberal policy positions.

Is the term someone who supports capitalism in any measure? Because even FDR supported capitalism. But highly regulated.

I consider it to mean someone who does not think capitalism needs to be regulated in a way to insure those with no capital benefit from the wealth creating power of capitalism. And of course that regulation includes hidden cost like environmental damage etc.

Because everyone I know supports capitalism. Most people I know think it needs to be reigned in even if the don’t realize what that involves.

Yes, asking for a serious discussion on DU!

I am curious about your thoughts.

Have a nice evening.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

The definition and usage of the term have changed over time.[7] As an economic philosophy, neoliberalism emerged among European liberal scholars in the 1930s as they attempted to trace a so-called "third" or "middle" way between the conflicting philosophies of classical liberalism and socialist planning.[25]:14

In the 1960s, usage of the term "neoliberal" heavily declined. When the term re-appeared in the 1980s in connection with Augusto Pinochet's economic reforms in Chile, the usage of the term had shifted. It had not only become a term with negative connotations employed principally by critics of market reform, but it also had shifted in meaning from a moderate form of liberalism to a more radical and laissez-faire capitalist set of ideas. Scholars now tended to associate it with the theories of Mont Pelerin Society economists Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan.[7][26] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism became established as a common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused into the English-language study of political economy.[7] By 1994, with the passage of NAFTA and with the Zapatistas' reaction to this development in Chiapas, the term entered global circulation.[6] Scholarship on the phenomenon of neoliberalism has been growing over the last few decades.[18][27]

Much more at link. As you can see, neoliberalism has very little to do with traditional notions of left/right, liberal/conservative political ideologies, and, IMO, has more to do with sugar coating Austrian school (alluded to by the term classic liberalism- note the small "l" ) economics to make more palatable to the masses, who much preferred the Keynesian policies of FDR's New Deal, as they made life much better than the Randian Darwinism espoused by the Austrians.

Sadly, in the 90's and moving forward, many New Democrats/Third Way Dems adopted neoliberal ("lite"?) economic philosophies, to avoid alienating big donors, while maintaining strong Liberal (note the capital "L" ) social policies to maintain the loyalty of the Democratic base. Unfortunately, this accelerated the growing income inequality and concentration of wealth in a smaller percentage of the population.

Thank goodness we have some candidates this cycle who are strongly advocating for a return to highly regulated capitalism, a living wage, etc.

At least what happened in the 80s and 90s.

And of course my perspective is shaped by my experience which I realize is limited.

From the 30’s to the 70’s my extended family was pretty poor southern democrats. Not the poorest as we were never sharecroppers. Actually from way before the 30’s but we are speaking about Democratic policies in the last century. By the 70’s and certainly the 80’s we were no longer poor. Quite the opposite in fact. Not rich, but comfortable. And not talking about my immediate family. My dad died a Democrat. And human nature being what it is all the family of course chalked their success up to hard work and wise decisions. When in fact it was only Democratic Party policies that allowed them to gain that wealth. No other reason. Without the Democratic Party the heart of the south would be a 3rd world nation.

But regardless. Now they were paying taxes and good god! Some of that money was going to help black folks. They were ripe for Reagan’s Southern Strategy which was really nation wide.

I saw and still see the free market change in our party not as a result of people being ‘bought off’, but a reaction to the changed electorate. They felt and feel they no longer need the government, in fact have conveniently forgot what it did for them, and resent those that do. Oh, and they consider themselves good Christians!

So I have never blamed Clinton for the 3rd way thing. Without it I think George I would have had a second term. Hell, without Perot he might have.

This is still what we are fighting. Throw in the evangelical nuts and it gets ramped up.

So my feelings is that what the Democratic Party did in the 90’s was find a way to survive and even get 8 years in the White House we would not have had otherwise. If you read American history it goes in cycles and Clinton defied that cycle.

Fast forward to today. Even the cretins on the right know something is amiss. We know it is out of control capitalism. And many of them sense it. But the racism is strong in this country. But the flat out racist aren’t the worst problem. It the religious nuts. They truly think god sent trump. They will never abandon him. I know. Some of my family is in that group.


Anyway. I’ve made you read enough. The main reason I stay on DU is having respectful discussion with folk I disagree with. The internet usually turns into an insult festival and if you check my history you will see I fall for that occasionally. Usually bourbon is involved!

I welcome your disagreement!

Have a nice weekend.

Society, in 1956,

(Democracy In Chains -- The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, p 51, 2017)

Her finding about their definition still holds. It's not academic.

It's newly revealed history. And broadly understood across all voters as what distinguishes the Republican Party from the Democratic Party.

It's now a pejorative, a scare word devoid of meaning. Period.

Avowed libertarians call anyone -- anyone -- a neoliberal, because they want it to be a pejorative.

Neoliberal is an epithet even when used incorrectly or unfairly by liberals against other liberals. And it pisses me off that it's thrown all around to simply confuse people in the Democratic Party.

People "too centrist" in liberal circles who still get neoliberal hurled at them, should understand that the hurlers don't really know what they're talking about.

The neoliberal label doesn't make them that at all, all party history, policies and politics weighed.

The most important thing is that neoliberal is now established as a pejorative. So is conservative -- what the Republicans, Kochs, and all the debunked economists of the Mont Peler/University of Chicago schools of economics call themselves -- for that matter. Even now we see old head conservatives try to differentiate themselves from the Trumpian, populist kind of conservatism, but it's all from the same cesspool. It's racist, sexist and every other feature you can think of.

And now conservative as a pejorative has become common knowledge -- except in the evangelical world, where common knowledge is non-existent.

It's common knowledge that liberal and even libtard have been dropped as pejorative labels because of how much their users get mocked as stupid, and shows them to be neoliberal right wingers, even if they don't know it. Deep down, people know that liberals have helped them.

The University of Chicago will never live down its associations with the Mont Pelerin Society, von Mises, Hayek and James M. Buchanan (who wrote the Chilean govt's constitution under Pinochet as a beta test of economic rule over Chileans), all of whose ideas are now the foundation of the Koch brothers' network to capture this democratic republic government.

The U of C. remains silent about its vile economics and stupidity to this day.

United States

Geographer and Marxist political economist David Harvey argues the rise of neoliberalism occurred during the 1970s energy crisis, and traces it in particular to Lewis Powell's 1971 confidential memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce. A call to arms to the business community to counter criticism of the free enterprise system, it was a significant factor in the rise of conservative and libertarian organizations and think-tanks which advocated for neoliberal policies, such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academia and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. For Powell, universities were becoming an ideological battleground, and he recommended the establishment of an intellectual infrastructure to serve as a counterweight to the increasingly popular ideas of Ralph Nader and other opponents of big business. On the left, neoliberal ideas were developed and widely popularized by John Kenneth Galbraith while the ideas of the Chicago School were advanced and repackaged into a progressive, leftist perspective in Lester Thurow's influential 1980 book "The Zero-Sum Society".

Early roots of neoliberalism were laid in the 1970s during the Carter administration, with deregulation of the trucking, banking and airline industries. This trend continued into the 1980s under the Reagan administration, which included tax cuts, increased defense spending, financial deregulation and trade deficit expansion. Likewise, concepts of supply-side economics, discussed by the Democrats in the 1970s, culminated in the 1980 Joint Economic Committee report "Plugging in the Supply Side". This was picked up and advanced by the Reagan administration, with Congress following Reagan's basic proposal and cutting federal income taxes across the board by 25% in 1981.

During the 1990s, the Clinton administration also embraced neoliberalism by supporting the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), continuing the deregulation of the financial sector through passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act and implementing cuts to the welfare state through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. The neoliberalism of the Clinton administration differs from that of Reagan as the Clinton administration purged neoliberalism of neoconservative positions on militarism, family values, opposition to multiculturalism and neglect of ecological issues. Writing in New York, journalist Jonathan Chait disputed accusations that the Democratic Party had been hijacked by neoliberals, saying that its policies have largely stayed the same since the New Deal. Instead, Chait suggested this came from arguments that presented a false dichotomy between free market economics and socialism, ignoring mixed economies. American feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser says the modern Democratic Party has embraced a "progressive neoliberalism," which she describes as a "progressive-neoliberal alliance of financialization plus emancipation". Historian Walter Scheidel says that both parties shifted to promote free market capitalism in the 1970s, with the Democratic Party being "instrumental in implementing financial deregulation in the 1990s".

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism|

David Horowitz, for example.

I notice some people have attempted to answer the question in your subject line (and others have commented on it but haven't really treated the question seriously). But I don't see that anyone has addressed your normative statement ("government's role is to step in when markets fails, not to replace them, and to aid those who markets leave behind" ), or your final question ("Are there people who believe you can have a functional economy without markets?" ).

The government's role can be any number of things - it's not defined by god or nature or anything. (And people shouldn't overlook the fact that the market system itself is a government product). It can be the role of government to provide an alternative to markets - we do that for roads and K-12 education, for example - and it could be extended to other areas of life if the political will to do so exists.

I find your final question to be the most interesting. The short answer is yes, there are such people. I assume when you say "functional economy" you mean a complex industrial economy with a division of labor characterized by a high degree of specialization. (If not, the answer is "duh, of course," as markets played little or no role in most people's lives throughout most of history.) One would have to develop feedback mechanisms that could replace price signals (democratic institutions, potentially). The political feasibility of such a project seems questionable to me, though. My reasoning there is that there's a sort of prisoner's dilemma type problem at play. The market system is (so far) the best at capital accumulation, which (among other competitive advantages) produces the most fearsome war machines. Any population pursuing alternatives is likely to be subjugated. And if someone comes up with a system that is better at capital accumulation, I believe it would be undesirable for other reasons (e.g. capital accumulation is steadily undermining the natural systems that support human life; I don't think we should accelerate that process).

Last edited Sat Jul 13, 2019, 08:07 PM - Edit history (1)

Who call President Clinton President Obama neoliberals.

Remember "ending welfare as we know it"?

(He did raise the upper tax rate, while at the same time cutting the capital gains rate)

Obama's appointment of Tim Geitner and approving bailouts of the very banks that caused the GFC rather than prosecuting them, showed him appeasing the big donors by favoring a neoliberal, rather than Keynesian, solution to the GFC.

If FDR were around in 2008, he would have let the big banks fail, prosecuted the criminals who ran them, forced the mortgage companies to accept a mark-to-market valuation (aka "cram down" ) of failing underwater mortgages rather than mass foreclosures, and would have used the trillions of dollars that were used for bailouts instead for New Deal type programs to keep Americans working (think of how much infrastructure could have been rebuilt if those trillions had been used to repair roads and bridges instead bail out criminal bankers)

He was not a neoliberal.

When he could have used the momentum from his historic election in 2008 to implement an aggressive Keynesian remedy?

"In the end, as their representatives in Washington should have known all along, even those voters who revered Ronald Reagan, and cheered on the contract-signing candidates in principle, were not ready when they learned that freed markets would leave them with sole responsibility for their own fates, to give up their Social Security and Medicare, their public schools and their government-backed air, water, and earth protections. As important, Bill Clinton's legendary ability to 'triangulate' -- taking on as his own some of the goals they proposed while drawing the line against such extreme measures as a balanced budget amendment -- took the steam out of the House GOP's sails. To be repeatedly outwitted by Clinton, a president the radical right had spent much effort and untold treasure trying to undermine, made the sting of defeat all the more sharp."
Nancy MacLean, "Democracy in Chains."

The talking point that Democrats and Republicans are the same:

1- Banks failed en masse in the 30s fueling the Great Depression. Letting banks fail is the WORST thing to do.
2- FDR didn't convict a single damn banker back then. Yet you say he would have in 2008-09?
3 - Geithner was a lifelong regulator who FORCED the banks to pay back TARP
4- TARP earned a PROFIT of over $100 billion dollars!
5- Obama passed a $900 billion STIMULUS - how is that neoliberal?
6- cramdowns don't prevent foreclosures! NEVER HAVE.
7- TARP was passed by Bush and all the loans to banks occurred in 2008
8- TARP and the Fed loans WERE Keynesian - Austrians would have let the markets straighten things out
9 - Dodd-Frank by Obama became the toughest bank regulation ever - much better than the piss-weak Glass Steagall that didn't apply to 99% of the banks in the USA

Absurd.

From the guy who coined the term “Global Trumpism” and predicted a trump and brexit

seen on twitter. It's overkill like "establishment".. it means nothing to me.. you'll have to ask those who use it to insult Dems.

themselves progressives.. so. following the yellow brick road of logic. neo-liberals are progressives..why is it an epithet? honestly never have heard anyone called that in RL..

The first time I heard it was to describe Democrats who have become so called moderate Republicans supporting supply side economics in the 90s. Maybe late 80s. I’m getting older and it runs together!

Now I hear it from the far left of the party to describe moderate Democrats. I have yet to hear it used to describe leftist. But I’m sure that is coming.

While I am aware that there is an academic definition for the word, it has now become a slur cast at political opponents.

See my post above

Most true progressives reject neoliberalism.

These days, the meaning of “neoliberal” has become fuzzy. But it has a long history of association with the Democratic Party.

https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2019/6/11/18660240/democrats-neoliberalism

The fallout from the 2016 election has created many surreal moments for historians of American politics and parties, but surely one of the oddest has been the introduction of the term neoliberal into the popular discourse. Even stranger still is that it has become a pejorative largely lobbed by the left less at Republicans and more at Democrats. As neoliberal has come to describe a wide range of figures, from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates, its meaning has become stretched thin and caused fuzziness and disagreement. This muddle of meanings creates an opportunity to seek a more precise understanding of what I call “Democratic neoliberalism.”

It is actually not the first time Democrats have been called neoliberal. In the early 1980s, the term emerged to describe a group of figures also called the Watergate Babies, Atari Democrats, and New Democrats, many of whom eventually became affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). In this iteration, the term neoliberal was embraced not as opprobrium. Rather, it used a form of self-description and differentiation to imply that they were “new Democrats.” In 1982, Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters published “A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto,” which aimed to lay out the core principles of this group; two years later, journalist Randall Rothenberg wrote a book called The Neoliberals that sought to codify and celebrate this cohort’s ascendency.

The DLC and its allies have largely received attention from political historians for their electoral strategy instead of their policies. Yet, even more than electoral politics, this group had an impact on shaping the ideas and policy priorities of the Democratic Party in key issues of economic growth, technology, and poverty. They also created a series of initiatives that sought to fuse these arenas together in lasting ways. The realm of policies is where parties can have an impact that reaches beyond elections to shape the lives of individual people and intensify structures and patterns of inequality. It thus points to the importance of expanding the study of US political parties writ large, beyond simply an examination of political strategy and electoral returns and instead thinking about the ways in which parties come to reflect and shape ideas and policy. It also demonstrates the importance of treating neoliberalism less as an epithet and more as a historical development.

Unlike their counterparts in fields like sociology and geography and even in other historical subfields, historians of the United States were long reluctant to adopt the term “neoliberal.” Many still argue that the neologism has become, in the words of Daniel Rodgers, “a linguistic omnivore” that is anachronistic and potentially “cannibalizing.” In the past few years, scholars of 20th-century American political history, however, have increasingly embraced neoliberalism and sought to understand its historical evolution. Building and drawing on the work of influential theorists like David Harvey, these inquiries have been important in the efforts to understand the relationship between capitalism and politics and the power dynamics with them.

Yet these accounts have largely depicted the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s as inextricably intertwined with conservative ascent and the Reagan Revolution, and situated the Clinton era and the rise of the New Democrats as a piece of a larger story about the dominance of the free market and the retreat of government. This approach flattened and obscured the important ways that the Clintons and other New Democrats’ promotion of the market and the role of government was distinct from Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and their followers.

The principles and policies Clinton and the DLC espoused were not solely a defensive reaction to the Republican Party or merely a strategic attempt to pull the Democratic Party to the center. Rather, their vision represents parts of a coherent ideology that sought to both maintain and reformulate key aspects of liberalism itself. In The Neoliberals, Rothenberg observed that “neoliberals are trying to change the ideas that underlie Democratic politics.” Taking his claim seriously provides a means to think about how this group of figures achieved that goal and came to permanently transform the agenda and ideas of the Democratic Party.

From Watergate Babies to New Democrats

snip



A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto

By Charles Peters; Charles Peters is the editor of The Washington Monthly.

September 5, 1982

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/09/05/a-neo-liberals-manifesto/21cf41ca-e60e-404e-9a66-124592c9f70d/?utm_term=.ce3a69efb8e6

NEO-LIBERALISM is a terrible name for an interesting, if embryonic, movement. As the sole culprit at the christening, I hereby attest to the innocence of the rest of the faithful. They deserve something better, because they are a remarkable group of people.

The best known are three promising senators: Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gary Hart of Colorado and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. The ones I know best are my fellow journalists, including James Fallows and Gregg Easterbrook of The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley and Robert M. Kaus of Harper's, Nicholas Lemann and Joseph Nocera of Texas Monthly, and Randall Rothenberg of New Jersey Monthly. But there are many others, ranging from an academic economist like MIT's Lester Thurow to a mayor like Houston's Kathy Whitmire to a governor like Arizona's Bruce Babbitt. There's even a cell over at that citadel of traditional liberalism, The New Republic.

While we are united by a different spirit and a different style of thought, none of these people should be held responsible for all of what follows. Practicing politicians in particular should be presumed innocent of the more controversial positions. When I use the first person plural, it usually means some but not all of us, and occasionally it may mean just me.

If neo-conservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.

We have found these responses not only weren't helping but were often hampering us in confronting the problems that were beginning to cripple the nation in the 1970s: declining productivity; the closed factories and potholed roads that betrayed decaying plant and infrastructure; inefficient and unaccountable public agencies that were eroding confidence in government; a military with too many weapons that didn't work and too few people from the upper classes in its ranks; and a politics of selfishness symbolized by an explosion of political action committees devoted to the interests of single groups.

snip



A Neoliberal Says It’s Time for Neoliberals to Pack It In

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/03/a-neoliberal-says-its-time-for-neoliberals-to-pack-it-in/

My fellow neoliberal shill Brad DeLong has declared that it’s time for us to pass the baton to “our colleagues on the left.” As it happens, I agree with him in practice because I think it’s time for boomers to retire and turn over the reins to Xers and Millennials, who are generally somewhat to the left of us oldsters. Beyond that, though, there’s less here than meets the eye. DeLong says there are three reasons he thinks neoliberals should fade into the background:









At the risk of overanalyzing this, I think DeLong is still a neoliberal and has no intention of sitting back and letting progressives run wild. He has simply changed the target of his coalition building. Instead of compromising to bring in Republicans, he wants to compromise to bring in lefties. Now, this is not nothing: instead of compromising to the right, he now wants to compromise to the left. But I suspect that this simply means DeLong has moved to the left over the past couple of decades, just like lots of liberals.

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Third Way

The Third Way is a position akin to centrism that tries to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of some centre-right and centrist economic and some centre-left social policies. The Third Way was created as a re-evaluation of political policies within various centre-left progressive movements in response to doubt regarding the economic viability of the state and the overuse of economic interventionist policies that had previously been popularized by Keynesianism, but which at that time contrasted with the rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right. The Third Way is promoted by social liberals and some social democratic parties.

Major Third Way social democratic proponent Tony Blair claimed that the socialism he advocated was different from traditional conceptions of socialism and said: "My kind of socialism is a set of values based around notions of social justice. [...] Socialism as a rigid form of economic determinism has ended, and rightly". Blair referred to it as a "social-ism" involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent and advocated social justice, social cohesion, equal worth of each citizen and equal opportunity. Third Way social democratic theorist Anthony Giddens has said that the Third Way rejects the traditional conception of socialism and instead accepts the conception of socialism as conceived of by Anthony Crosland as an ethical doctrine that views social democratic governments as having achieved a viable ethical socialism by removing the unjust elements of capitalism by providing social welfare and other policies and that contemporary socialism has outgrown the Marxist claim for the need of the abolition of capitalism. In 2009, Blair publicly declared support for a "new capitalism".

The Third Way supports the pursuit of greater egalitarianism in society through action to increase the distribution of skills, capacities and productive endowments while rejecting income redistribution as the means to achieve this. It emphasises commitment to balanced budgets, providing equal opportunity which is combined with an emphasis on personal responsibility, the decentralisation of government power to the lowest level possible, encouragement and promotion of public–private partnerships, improving labour supply, investment in human development, preserving of social capital and protection of the environment. However, specific definitions of Third Way policies may differ between Europe and the United States. The Third Way has been criticised by certain conservatives, liberals and libertarians who advocate laissez-faire capitalism. It has also been heavily criticised by other social democrats and in particular democratic socialists, anarchists and communists as a betrayal of left-wing values, with some analysts characterising the Third Way as an effectively neoliberal movement.

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best description so far.

In the 1940s and 1950s the word "neoliberal" was used to describe economists like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. These were people who rejected the planned economies of the right and left (hence "liberal" ) but also rejected the laissez faire doctrine that was considered "classical liberalism" (hence "neo-" ).

The word is a very broad label that at this point is close to meaningless; in the sense of rejecting both total central planning and total laissez faire, basically every economist and politician in the West today is "neoliberal".

Slightly more focus can come in if you look at the question of internationalism. In broad strokes, neoliberals have worked to weaken national institutions and expand international and trans-national institutions. So, you have projects like the EU, the various free trade blocs like NAFTA or whatever the hell we're calling it now, NATO on the military side, etc.

Again in broad strokes, neoliberalism kind of implies a bent towards technocratism, as well as a belief that economic growth is a better alleviator of human misery than redistribution.

to describe liberals/Democrats.

By today's economic standards, the original neoliberals would be most analogous to laissez-faire capitalists, like the Kochs and their ilk.

BUT, it connects the word "liberal" with extreme RW economic behavior, so it's come to be used by uber-clever manipulators as a profoundly dishonest smear.

economy at this time.

The same economy, I might add, that's lead to austerity in several countries, literally the opposite of what you italicized, while lauding their "successes" in India and China as if those countries didn't use their relatively unique positions practice protectionist policies of their own industries as well as making sure investment comes back home, while forgetting what's happening in much of the rest of the world outside of the G8.

Billions being left behind by this economy, an economy that only functions because people are paid barely enough to survive(and sometimes not even that) so that we in the more "developed" nations enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Hell, as demonstrated with the war in the Ukraine, so called "free trade" policies can't even guarantee world peace. Its only a mechanism for a small minority to hoard most of the world's wealth.

I do have a question though, why is it that most "developing" economies take so goddamned long to develop?