Why YSK: I’ve noticed in recent years more people using “neoliberal” to mean “Democrat/Labor/Social Democrat politicians I don’t like”. This confusion arises from the different meanings “liberal” has in American politics and further muddies the waters.
Neoliberalism came to the fore during the 80’s under Reagan and Thatcher and have continued mostly uninterrupted since. Clinton, both Bushs, Obama, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Johnson, and many other world leaders and national parties support neoliberal policies, despite their nominal opposition to one another at the ballot box.
It is important that people understand how neoliberalism has reshaped the world economy in the past four decades, especially people who are too young to remember what things were like before. Deregulation and privatization were touted as cost-saving measures, but the practical effect for most people is that many aspects of our lives are now run by corporations who (by law!) put profits above all else. Neoliberalism has hollowed out national economies by allowing the offshoring of general labor jobs from developed countries.
In the 80’s and 90’s there was an “anti-globalization” movement of the left that sought to oppose these changes. The consequences they warned of have come to pass. Sadly, most organized opposition to neoliberal policies these days comes from the right. Both Trump and the Brexit campaign were premised on reinvigorating national economies. Naturally, both failed, in part because they had no cohesive plan or understanding that they were going against 40 years of precedent.
So, yes, establishment Democrats are neoliberals, but so are most Republicans.
Watching from a far (The Netherlands), it always amazed me how the political scale in the US is described. Even the democrats in the US feel more to the right, then positioned in the US. Some people go as far to call democrats communist, but I don’t think these people know what communist really is, in the same way that Americans don’t seem to know what (neo)liberal actually is. It is both entertaining and concerning to watch.
Yeah, the idea that Democrats are center-left is hilarious - by the standards in most of Europe, they’re not even center-right, just plain rightwing, whilst the Republicans are pretty much far-right (given their heavy religious, ultra-nationalis, anti-immigrant and warmongering - amongst others - rethoric).
The Overtoon Window has moved to the Right everywhere but in the US it did way much further than in most of Europe.
As for the whole neoliberalism stuff, it’s pretty easy to spot the neoliberal parties even when they’ve disguised themselves as leftwing or (genuine) conservatives: they’re the ones always obcessing about what’s good for businesses whilst never distinguishing between businesses which are good for people and society and those which aren’t: in other words, they don’t see businesses (and hence what’s “good for businesses”) as a means to the end of being “good for people” (i.e. “good for businesses which are good for people hence good for people”) but as an end in itself quite independently of what that does for people.
The Democrats are more socially left wing than the vast majority of European parties.
Don’t confuse Identity Politics, aka “We care only about that inequality which doesn’t involve the priviledges of wealth” as leftwing.
Those who disregard the biggest inequality of treatment there is by a HUGE margin (that of wealth) and only care about those inequalities which can be “fixed” without putting their own inherited priviledges (usually from being born in the high middle-class and above) at risk aren’t lefties as they’re not really fighting for the greatest good for the greatest number.
The kind of liberalism that ignores the power of money and ownership to constraint others’ freedom of action is incompatible with getting the greatest outcome for the greatest number because they see restrictions of accumulation of wealth and resources and anti-freedom and it’s been painfully obvious for decades that maximization of the greatest good for the greatest number is the exact opposite of the direction of concentration of wealth and ownership we have been travelling on.
Turning the other way while migrants drown in the Mediterranean isn’t “Identity Politics” and the insistence on cultural homogenization and labeling plurinationalism “Identity Politics” is very typical of European right-wing social ideology that pervades the parties in power.
Now you’re just using an “appeal to emotion” falacy.
A person who genuinelly wants to help others LOGICALLY starts by the ones most in need, and those are mainly those living in horrible conditions in refugee camps, not those who have a few thousand dollars to pay a trafficker.
Your barelly disguised neoliberal take on Equality with “oh so obvious” late XXth century marketing shaped appeals to emotion and eternaly repeated unthinking slogans which are fashionable within certain tribes (and hence social tokens of group membership amongst that crowd, who really are just in it for the sweet social ego-stroking) isn’t left-wing, it isn’t even a genuine want to do good by others, since it doesn’t obbey even the basic logic of “to do the most good you start by those in most need” something which would force looking at wealth inequality.
The internal-inconsistencies needed to exclude wealth inequality from that bundle of easilly parroted marketing slogans that portrays to be a political theory that fights Equality are so large, that even the idea that help should be allocated by need not by “insert easilly visibly characteristice people were born with” is seen as a threat.
Caring about migrants’ lives isn’t an appeal to emotion.
You’re seriously misguided if you believe that.
Tell me how Romani are treated in Europe
I think our country is starting to look like the US more and more which is scary.
Yeah agreed. Last elections I wasn’t really sure what to vote on anymore, the political landscape is becoming to extreme for my taste. There are virtually no center parties anymore, especially when you exclude the religious related parties. With the recent election and the debates, the media is also trying to create a left versus right, which is a very strange thing to do in our system.
In the end, it would be nice to just have a government that cares about its people and future, they have made way too many mistakes over the past decade, mistakes that were avoidable if only they had listened. Cases in point: reversing the student grant system, pushing important government tasks to local governments (while reducing their budget) and the whole childcare debacle. Literally for all of these f*ups, the government was warned by experts…
You need to understand, our two party system is not part of the actual government as it was designed. They are basically a pack of oligarchs running a good cop-bad cop routine on the electorate.
Our voting system naturally favors this dynamic. Anywhere you see “first past the post”, ask if the people feel like they’re voting for the leaders they’d prefer, or against the candidates that scare them the most. Oligarchic duopoly is the dominant game theoretic strategy inherent to FPTP.
ELI5: The difference between neoliberal (as defined above) and libertarianism.
Right-wing libertarians (this is another term with two very different meanings) are neoliberal absolutists. Center-right and center-left politicians usually have to compromise with other sets of ideals. Marijuana decriminalization and legalization is one area where right-wing politicians typically preference the social conservative side over the neoliberal/libertarian side. For a center-left example look at the Affordable Care Act. From the beginning Obama was never going to favor a true nationalized health care plan. He offered compromises within the existing framework like state exchanges.
On the ACA, basing it off of Romney-care was the most “no feathers to be ruffled here” play Obama could have made for such a system. Funnier still, I believe Romney got that plan handed to him by The Heritage Foundation. It would only take the “Dem” side of the coin proposing it for it to be labeled as communism coming for America.
.
Neoliberalism is more focused on free trade and globalism, whereas libertarianism focus more on individual liberties and minimal governmental intervention in all aspects of society, not just economically.
Sorry if that’s not ELI5, but that’s the gist.
I think the confusion, in part, stems from the fact that if someone proclaims they are “a liberal” it often turns out they care mostly or exclusively for economical liberalism. At least that’s my impression when talking to people.
The confusion comes because “liberal” is a very nebulous word that can mean very different things.
In terms of political ideology, there are three main types that generally exist in Western democracies.
-
Classical liberalism - emphasizes individual freedom, limited government intervention in the economy, and the protection of natural rights, such as life, liberty, and property.
-
Neoliberalism - emphasizes free markets, deregulation, privatization, and reduced government intervention in the economy.
-
Social Liberalism - combines the values of individual freedom with a belief in the role of government in addressing social and economic inequalities through healthcare, education, and welfare programs.
Typically these days, especially in the US, most people think of #3 when they hear the word “liberal” in a political sense, I’d say.
-
It almost feels like political labels are there to deceive and confuse people or the political science is a meme that can’t be trusted to name things. I swear, majority of political conflict is just people misunderstanding each other.
I’m writing a thesis that has significant support that the United States is and has, with the exception of about 30 years of progressive policy, been a plutocracy. The divisions in put country are by design. Division among racial lines, political affiliation, religious affiliation, professions, etc. are used to prevent the unification of the laboring class and dissuade us from collectively recognizing and challenging the status quo. The working people of this country have far more in common than not, but the political and moneyed class sow division via these wedge issues to prevent radical change - which would likely shift the US toward Scandinavian style social democracy.
It’s not a unique problem to US either. Every country I lived in seems to suffer from this in some form or shape. I’d even argue that people need some sort of conflict and the manipulators are taking advantage of this.
Distracting and confusing the peasants is such a natural tool in our current society too, where outrage, click bait and manufactured conflict aligns with attention-based business (i.e. ads). So everything just works naturally.
People need to be mindful and aware of this so thanks for writing about it!
So, while you’re 100% correct about neoliberalism not belonging to either the left or the right, your basic description of neoliberalism isn’t correct. What you describe (deregulation, positive valuation of wealth generation, free markets, etc) is just liberal capitalism.
Neoliberalism names the extension of market-based rationalities into putatively non-market realms of life. Meaning, neoliberalism is at play when people deploy cost/benefit, investment/return, or other market-based logics when analysing options, making decisions, or trying to understand aspects of life that aren’t properly markets, such as politics, morality/ethics, self-care, religion, culture, etc.
A concrete example is when people describe or rationalize self-care as a way to prepare for the workweek. Yoga, in this example, becomes of an embodiment of neoliberalism: taking part in yoga is rationalized as an investment in self that results in greater productivity.
Another example: how it seems that most every public policy decision is evaluated in terms of its economic viability, and if it isn’t economically viable (in terms of profit/benefit exceeding cost/investment) then it is deemed a bad policy. This is a market rationality being applied to realms of life that didn’t used to be beholden to market rationalities.
Hence the “neo” in “neoliberalism” is about employing the logics of liberalism (liberal capitalism, I should say) into new spheres of life.
A good (re)source for this would be Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures, which trace the shift from Liberalism to Neoliberalism. As well, there’s excellent literature coming out of anthropology about neoliberalism at work in new spheres, in particular yoga, which is why I used it as my example here.
Yes! For anyone wanting more reading on the subject, Start here https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/ Monbiot is also a good primer: https://www.astrid-online.it/static/upload/monb/monbiot_guardian_15_04_16.pdf
Globalized trade is good actually
Globalized trade has been a thing long before neo-liberalism existed, arguably longer than capitalism has existed. Equating neo-liberalism with “global/globalized trade” is incredibly reductive…
I didn’t see that comment as reductive. More like pointing out a part of neo-liberalism that the commenter thought was good.
In other words, the comment is simply “globalized economy is good.” The comment is not what you’re inferring: "neo-liberalism is good because globalized economy is good "
Yes this is actually what I meant.
I do not subscribe to neoliberal economics- if anything I’m just left of the average Keynesian.
I’m Georgist, and I agree with you that global trade is good. Why would we purposely do to ourselves what we do to our adversaries during wartime? One certainly doesn’t have to subscribe to all of neoliberalism to believe global trade is good.
Yes.
Pushing every poor country to invest on the same export industries because your ideology believes they are inferior people that can only ever do that, or because you want them to subsidize your local consumers of those industries is not a good thing.
But people can’t handle any complexity, and this get turned into “advocated global trading”.
On the whole, for sure. But that doesn’t make it any more palatable for workers when jobs are relocated from their area.
Right, but that’s less of a consequence of Globalization and more of a consequence of our national economy being structured in a way that offsets risk onto the most vulnerable working class folks. If we had universal healthcare not reliant on employment, reskilling assistance, and some kind of basic income, it would be easier to both protect people and reap the benefits of Globalization.
our national economy being structured in a way that offsets risk onto the most vulnerable working class folks
i.e. neoliberalism
Internationalism is good. Globalism is not. All globalism means is open borders for capital and hard borders for workers.
Globalism when used by like 95% of people includes dropping immigration restrictions, so I’m not sure what you’re on about here.
Not really. They emphasize “legal” immigration, by which they mean a series of restrictions on how people are allowed to enter the country and what qualifies them to become citizens. The actual implementation of neoliberal policies always includes strict border controls, limited asylum seeking, 2nd class citizenship for migrants, and harsh penalties for migrating “wrong” and not jumping through all the legal and financial hoops.
Capital moving freely while migrants die in the Mojave and drown in the Mediterranean.
Again, 95% of people who use the term “globalist” to describe someone else associate it with open borders. I’m not sure what you’re on about here.
People who describe themselves as globalists generally reject the idea of open borders. Labor visas, not the free movement of labor.
What you’re talking about is a smear, not reality.
Much more than globalized trade, globalized sharing of knowledge, awareness and circumstance - perhaps even globalized power, one day. The fight against capitalism will definitely require a great plan to take global communication away from private capital.
Student loans debt slavery is bad actually.
Neoliberals hate when this is brought up.
And cheese is made of cow’s milk. Non sequiturs are fun!
Yes which is why you made one just now.
Criticism of the economic policies of a group that is focused on economic policy is appropriate.
Sorry your bff’s like student loans debt
It’s kinda sad how classical social democracy is basically dead nowadays. Here in Europe they are almost all neoliberals and some (like in Denmark) even start to mix this with right wing social policies.
Slightly OT comment from me, so sorry.
Social democracy was a false idol anyways, nothing but socialism can work in the long term, socdem always gets repealed by the rich.
What socialist societies that have existed have lasted a long time?
Rome lasted a lot, should we get back to empire and slavery?
Rome was a republic for like 500 years.
It was, than it wasn’t any more.
centre-left
This is misleading. Neoliberalism is inherently capitalist, not socialist/communist.
All left-right political terminology is inherently subjective, so you can argue neoliberalism is promoted by center-left parties as long as you’re defining the center as being to the right of that. Since this post seems to be about the United States, that center is already pretty far to the right as measured from, say, Denmark (picked a name out of a hat). I think the bigger argument here is about US-defaultism rather than whether or not it’s OK for Americans to describe things in terms that relate to their political climate.
What you said makes zero sense. Neoliberalism is distinctly NOT a left wing ideology. To even try and associate them makes you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Can we not bring this energy over from Reddit? You’re arguing with something I didn’t even say. We both agree, neoliberalism is not a left wing ideology. I didn’t say that, the OP didn’t say that, I don’t know who you’re even talking to with that remark.
What the OP said is that American center-left and center-right parties have both been proponents of neoliberalism. The only part of this that’s remotely controversial is whether it’s accurate to describe any American political parties as “center-left”. From a global perspective, you can easily argue that that’s not accurate. Go for it. From an American perspective, there are parties who are to the left of the (American) center. The Democrats are both center-left from the American perspective and proponents of neoliberalism. To restate: That does not mean that neoliberalism is a center-left or any other kind of leftist ideology. It only means what it says.
It’s not subjective - the definitions of words has been eroded on purpose. This is orwellian destruction of language and it works
Of course it’s subjective. The terminology of the left-right political divide originally referred to 18th-century France. In the 21st century, we’re usually not defining the political center of a nation by how it compares to the French Parliament of 250 years ago. The center moves over time and space, and the left and right are relative to that center.
I do think this comment thread is confusing people, though, as noted in an above edit. For clarity, nobody is saying neoliberalism is a center-left movement.
The very concept of putting political spectrum in one-dimensional axis is purposefully broken. Left vs right doesn’t tell you jack shit about the actual ideologies. Life is more complex than this
Dude, you quoted a single word out from OP and somehow even got that wrong. Which makes me think you’re being deliberately obtuse.
OP wrote about “center-left” – the American spelling. So it’s clear that OP was discussing neo-liberalism from an American point of view. And in American politics, neo-liberalism is absolutely a component of center-left politics.
Sorry if this sounds angry. I get frustrated at the constant reframing of American politics under international standards. Yes, Americans lack a true leftwing in our politics. That’s well established at this point. Nitpicking language around “American left” vs “international left” derails real discussion and is not helpful.
I don’t know. If you ask me. I think asserting that everyone but you was wrong. And that you are correct because of a special America/western only definition is a height of the hypocrisy and absurdity.
Politics is not relative like your hands. They are defined and understood. Just not by westerners.
In this case, OP is clearly talking about American politics. That is what I am saying.
I was calling out a reply that purposefully distorted OP’s language, the language used in this specific post. The discussion of the American political compass versus the international political compass is beside the point. And it’s obtuse and unhelpful to derail a perfectly good discussion with insults aimed at OP’s clearly American perspective.
You think center-left is socialist/communist?
They don’t “think it”, as if they’re confused, they’re implicitly defining “left” as socialist, or at least anti-capitalist.
That’s not really reality tho is it?
And tbf, the portion of the right that is legit fascist kinda actually hates all those things. They’ve no love at all for their more economically-oriented allies.
Sheep hear these terms from talking heads on tv and radio. Those talking heads don’t know and/or don’t care what those terms actually mean. They only care that the sheep don’t know what they mean. That way they can apply whatever traits they need to apply to them to illicit an emotional response they need, then apply that term to the entity or event they want to target. Then the sheep regurgitate those arguments to others convincing fellow sheep and gaslighting others with their stupidity. One of the reasons arguing with these people is so pointless. You may as well be arguing with a voice recorder they have no idea what they are saying and an appeal to logic is useless as they are incapable of such a thing. I’ve actually broke people a few times where the just begin looping and eventually they just break and devolve into racism or some similar bigoted viewpoint these pundits latch onto for their appeal to emotion.
I’ve also recently noticed people claiming to be “neoliberals” but apparently meaning something like “progressive Democrat” and it’s really confusing so I appreciate this post. It’s already bad enough “liberal” has a bunch of different definitions, pretending neoliberalism is something else isn’t going to help anything or anyone.
Much the same way people on the left have been adopting the Republican definition of socialism, as in any time the government does anything. Like having basic welfare or some such suddenly equals socialism.
Now people have been overusing neoliberal so much that the ill informed have started using it for people that are clearly pro government spending, pro social safety net, pro regulation, etc. Discussion becomes unhelpful when people redefine the means by with we identify ideologies.
By the same token though, doesn’t socialism exactly mean basic welfare? Doesn’t socialism just boil down to looking after every member of society equally, such as with basic welfare if they aren’t working or universal healthcare to make sure anyone can access it regardless of station or wealth?
When it comes to defining economic systems, no. Unless the workers own the means of production, it’s not socialism. Even social democracies like the Nordic countries is just capitalism with safety nets and strong unions, not socialism. Calling such a system socialism only muddies the waters, which is exactly why Republicans do it, to conflate basic welfare systems and unions with evil socialism! We shouldn’t empower Republican talking points.
I see, so what’s the difference between that and Communism, I’d always thought the difference was socialism was the, I guess goal of supporting all of society? Regardless of the economic approach that generated the money. I’m pretty unfamiliar with this kind of discussion and I want to rectify that haha
Communism is the communal ownership of all means of production (not just the workers owning the place they work at like socialism) and communal distribution of resources based on need (ideally). A hippie commune where everyone works a job and everyone is distributed food, goods, etc. based on their needs without money being involved is a solid, small scale model of communism, though there are a lot of issues and various theoretical solutions when it’s scaled up beyond a group of like-minded individuals who all know each other. In theory such a society is classless and has no use for currency. The reality is such a society has never actually existed and things fell apart along the way, usually by someone seizing power in the transitionary period and the state becoming a dictatorship instead.
For small scale references, worker cooperatives are a good example of socialism and communes are a good example of communism.
Ok I think I understand, thank you for taking the time to write it out for me 🙂
Money doesn’t work unless some people have some and some people don’t. The only way to actually fight globalism is with worker owned productivity becoming the norm. Otherwise you’ll always be stuck with the political false dichotomy of “Right” (fascism) vs “Left” (right of center).
This is very interesting and not discussed enough, thanks for sharing. Could you refer to some materials, where did you learn it?
The thing to get about deregulation in this context is that it’s a misleading term- ‘deregulation’ doesn’t mean un-doing regulation, it means handing regulatory authority over from democratically-accountable regulators, to private regulators that are less-accountable and often have interests at odds with those of the public.
In feudal times, regulation of trade or business was left to trade associations or guilds (who got to write their own rules that were typically rubber-stamped by the local nobility’s younger son) and that system more or less translated into today’s modern republics, up until the guilds and trade associations became trusts and monopolies. When the democratic regulatory state emerged to regulate spheres of business like banking and polluting industry because private regulators shat the bed, that was a shot in a war that the old guard business elites haven’t stopped fighting- they saw this as a taking of their power, and have sustained decades of effort to hand public authority back over to private trade associations
Seems to me this argument rests on the assumption of private regulators being less accountable public regulators but i don’t think this plays out so clear cut in practice. When’s the last time you ever had a problem with FINTRAC or the New York Stock exchange for instance?
The point I wanted to make here is that it matters who has regulatory control in a given sphere, and often private regulators’ interests and considerations will not be the same as those of the public at large. The democratic regulatory state exists (such as it is any more) because prior regimes of private regulation simply did not consider the public interest adequately. There is such a thing today as the EPA because congress in 1970 decided acid rain and rivers on fire wasn’t cool, and all of those ‘self-regulating’ industries out there just weren’t considering their downwind/downstream air-breathing, water-drinking neighbors enough. Likewise, regulatory controls on banking were imposed under the New Deal. The notion of public regulators is, historically speaking, a relatively recent one, and the ongoing political fighting about whether they ought to be public or private really ought to get the attention it deserves instead of being buried under abstract ‘government bad’ rhetoric.
absolutely horrid policies pushed initially by the chicago club If I’m not mistaken, the worst economic school of the last decades arguably. And tangentially is the root of the pickle the Argentinean economy is on the gutter
edit I apparently got carried away and tied the argentinean debacle with neoliberalism but that’s older than that
The Chicago Boys’ role in Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship really puts the lie to the whole “freedom” angle of neoliberalism. Allying with a guy who rounded up thousands of dissidents and summarily executed them shows their freedom is only for the select few.
Many leftists ( myself included) also have started to referring to neoliberals and other slightly-left centrists as just liberals" If you go right or left enough on the spectrum, liberal is an insult.
Speaking as an ML, there’s something admirable about old-school Keynesian Liberal Democrats who actually believed in the End of History and were optimistic that our lives could improve under Capitalism. I think Dukakis was the last of this breed to get anywhere near the White House.
Nowadays these sorts of people, your Liz Warren stans, just sound delusional. You’re either a Socialist or a “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” establishment Democrat, whose greatest hope is that at least things might not get worse.
