2y ago

YSK that “neoliberal” refers to a discrete set of economic policies including deregulation, privatization, and so-called “free trade” implemented by both center-right and center-left parties

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.

117 comments

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.
- 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 fups, the government was warned by experts...
  
  I dunno at least we switch leaders every eight years. The Rutte government is about to hit year 14, right?
- 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.
  
  I actually come from a country with a mathematically rigged voting system (not quite as much as the US, but still the current guys in power got 41% of votes and have an absolute parliamentary majority with 52% of parliamentary representatives) but lived for almost a decade in The Netherlands (which has Proportional Vote) as well as about the same in the UK (which is more like the US in that regard than the rest of Europe) and my impression is that there are 2 things pushing that dynamic in countries with such rigged voting systems vs the ones with Proportional Vote like The Netherlands:
  People do a lot of tactical voting in FPTP and similar because they can't find electable parties whose combination of ideas of how the country and society should be managed aligns mostly with theirs, so they vote for a "lesser evil" and often driven by "kicking the bad guys out" rather than "bring the good guys in". This makes it seem like the parties of the de facto power duopoly are more representative than they really are - in a PV system they wouldn't get anywhere as many votes because even people with niche takes on politics would find viable representation in parties with a much more similar take so wouldn't vote for them and would in fact be more likelly to vote positivelly rather than negativelly.
  The press itself in countries with the representative allocation systems rigged for power duopoly tends to present most subjects as having two sides only. This is complete total bollocks: people are complicated, social systems are complicated and almost no social/economic subject out there is so simple that there are only two reasonable ways of handling it and no more than two. This kind trains the public to look at things as two sided, reinforcing the idea that the system is representative as well as the us-vs-them mindless tribalism and even bipartisanism rather than the politics of consensus building.
- Most of our Dems voted to make it illegal for rail workers to strike.
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..
  EDIT: I read the comment wrong, OP is saying that international/global trade is not inherently bad, not that neo-liberalism is the same thing as international/global trade.
  
  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 "
- Yep, the best way to prevent rich powerful assholes from getting us into huge wars is to make it extremely unprofitable. Don't want to kill your market or labor force. Don't want to disrupt your supply chain. Etc.
  
  Literally the Ukraine war is an excellent example of this. Second most powerful army in the world fighting a much smaller and poorly equipped army. Now only the second most powerful army in Russia.
- 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.
- 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.
- Student loans debt slavery is bad actually.
  Neoliberals hate when this is brought up.
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.
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
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.
- 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.
- You think center-left is socialist/communist?
  
  America is dripping out of every letter of that comment, lol
  
  They don't "think it", as if they're confused, they're implicitly defining "left" as socialist, or at least anti-capitalist.
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!
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.
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?
- There is no neoliberalism in china.
Thanks. I never knew wth these people were talking about.
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?
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?
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.
ELI5: The difference between neoliberal (as defined above) and libertarianism.
- 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.
- Here's a good short article about neoliberalism that helps distinguish it from libertarianism.
  In short, I'd say libertarians view free markets as an end in themselves; and neoliberals view free markets as a powerful means to generate wealth and prosperity, but are realistic about the needs for state intervention either to address market failures or to distribute the wealth created (which, as the article notes, is something markets aren't always good at).
- .
- 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.
- The reason you're confused is because 90% of the people in this thread haven't read or understood Foucault, who gave us the best (though certainly not the only) description of neoliberalism. In it's muddled use by every day people and the media, it's meaning has become very confused.
  What people here are describing (deregulation, positive valuation of wealth generation, free markets, etc) is just different flavours of liberal capitalism. Neoliberalism isn't that.
  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.
YSK that anyone trying to generalize your political preferences into a singular term is propaganda. FTFY
Review the people you intend to vote for and see what their votes were on important issues.
Yeah, and it sucks. Eff the neoliberals. All my homies hate neoliberals.
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.
I would add that liberal means something different in USA vs. the rest of the world, so when a non-US progressive uses liberal as an insult it might mean closer to what we'd call a neoliberal in the US.
- And when conservatives use it they just mean "not conservative".
  The word has vanishingly little meaning at this point. Anytime you see someone using it implies ignorance or disingenuousness, more typically the former than the latter.
- If you look up the definitions of liberalism and neoliberalism I do not see a difference. Both want exactly the same: deregulation, strengthening the ownership of private capital assets, low taxes, no trade unions, reduced government spending, privatisation.
- And it's... bad that I'm pointing out that the difference in language exists? And is it really an issue to add neo- so we're all on the same page, particularly if you are using it in negative context?
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
- 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.
Democrats are neo-liberals, republicans are fascists, who would you like to fuck you in the ass first
- The decision to me is like asking whether I'd like to drink bleach or hydrochloric acid. They are both so bad that it isn't really master which of them fucks me in the ass
- Take the US for example with crippling student loan debt.
  
  Guess trade school wasn't such a failure after all.
The biggest thing to mention about neoliberals is that they are strongly pro student loan debt slavery.
Really wish there was a coherent structure to political labeling.
Follow a prefix-root-suffix system or something - one glance at name should give you some idea of where they land on the political spectrum and what their identity is built on.

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