“Neoliberal” has become a sort of slur in recent years. Critics seem to think that the word is a clever insult and a substantive argument rolled into one. How convenient it must be to have such a versatile rhetorical weapon always close-at-hand.
For a long time, the attacks on neoliberalism came exclusively from the left. When the recession hit in 2007 and Washington responded with $700 billion in corporate bailouts, it reawakened America’s leftist movement that had been dormant since the 1970s. That revived movement first took the shape of Occupy Wall Street, which honed in on a few villains, neoliberalism chief among them. Strangely, the OWS protesters who wanted to tear down neoliberalism never actually defined the word, and so it became a vague stand-in for capitalism and status-quo politics.
Four years later Bernie Sanders mainstreamed OWS’s concerns, making it politically possible — even popular — to rail against capitalism and the neoliberal order. The fact that he lost to Clinton (“one of the founders of neoliberal globalization,” according to Sanders backers) only fed the left’s anti-neoliberal flames. When establishment Democrats conspired to take down Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary and anoint Joe Biden the nominee instead, those flames became an inferno.
On balance, the bulk of the neoliberal criticism still comes from the left. Spend any time on leftist internet spaces and it becomes clear very quickly that there’s nothing worse than being a neolib. But the horseshoe theory of politics — which says that the far left and the far right are not that far apart — has made itself relevant in the neoliberalism discourse. Over the past few years, the far-right has started to condemn neoliberalism too.
Last year, before he was fired from Fox News, Tucker Carlson had a long segment he called “We are watching the end of neoliberalism.” In the 13-minute monologue, Carlson never actually takes the time to define neoliberalism clearly. Well, he does say that “neoliberalism is looting with a smokescreen of race and gender politics so you won’t know it happened.” But I have no idea what that actually means. Instead, Carlson brushes past any substantive description of the term and just retreads old ground, spending the 13 minutes railing against BLM, transgender people, and immigrants.
It’s bizarre to me that so few of neoliberalism’s critics have a real conception of what the word actually means. If you’re whole political project is about tearing something down, at least take the time to understand what that thing is! Because we’ve reached a point in the neoliberalism debate where the word has basically started to mean “any political idea or policy that I don’t like.” If you’re on the right and concerned about “transgender ideology?” Well, trans ideology is “neoliberalism in drag!” If you’re a lefty mad at park benches designed to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them? “Neoliberalism in a nutshell!”
Of course, there are thoughtful people who criticize neoliberalism, and they come from the left, the right, and the center. But these people the exceptions. For the most part, when people say they hate neoliberalism they’re not thinking about any particular philosophy. They’re just frustrated with the status quo of American life and think neoliberalism is to blame. They might not know what neoliberalism is, exactly, but they hate it with all their guts.
To be fair, all political definitions are slippery. Trying to express a complicated set of ideas with a single word is always going to be imperfect. Most people would struggle to define everyday terms like “progressive,” “conservative,” and “liberal.” A whole media cycle in March was wasted trying to define the word “woke.” So in some sense, I sympathize with the people who hate neoliberalism but struggle to define it. Definitions are hard!
Hard, but important. So, what is neoliberalism?
We can start with the word itself. The liberal in neoliberalism doesn’t mean liberal as we understand it today. The liberal in neoliberalism comes from something called classical liberalism, the strain of political thought that goes back to the Enlightenment and emphasizes economic freedom, private property, and free markets.
During the Great Depression, a lot of these classically liberal ideas went out of fashion. People were hurting and wanted the government to fix the economy. But then with the rise of fascism and communism in Europe, it quickly became clear how scary things can get when economic freedom is limited. In response, classically liberal ideas had a revival with philosophers like F.A. Hayek in the 1940s and after. That is where the neo (which just means new) in neoliberalism comes in.
It took a while for these ideas to make the jump from philosophy to politics. The first real attempt came in 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran on a platform of deregulation and economic liberty and got crushed by Lyndon Johnson. Americans were not on board with neoliberalism quite yet. But in 1976, Jimmy Carter became president. And while he’s now seen as a sort of progressive hero, he also oversaw lots of deregulation. Things continued in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan pressed his agenda of deregulation, free trade, and lower taxes.
Typically, critics of neoliberalism freeze history here and imagine Reagan as the archetypal neoliberal. But — and I think this is the crucial point to understanding neoliberalism today — the philosophy did not stagnate there. The people who consider themselves neoliberals today do not see themselves as disciples of Reagan because the philosophy continued to change and develop after he left office. It was under Bill Clinton, not Ronald Reagan, that neoliberalism really began to resemble neoliberalism as it’s practiced today.
That philosophy — the one that actually exists rather than the straw man constructed by neoliberalism’s opponents — is based on three principles.
First, free markets are a powerful engine for economic growth and prosperity.
Second, liberal democracy is the best system of government for ensuring individual rights and freedoms.
Third, free markets do not always produce fair or humane outcomes, and so a robust social safety net and economic redistribution are necessary to prevent deprivation.
The first principle is what most infuriates neoliberalism’s critics. The inclination to support free markets is often caricatured by opponents as subjugating everything in life to the profit motive. Neoliberals are, knowingly or not, doing the work for corporations and billionaires — or so the argument goes.
But really, things are not so sinister. Neoliberals simply look at recent history, see the colossal boom in economic growth and human welfare that free markets have produced, and say “more of that, please.” And while critics say that neoliberals are wilfully blind to the amoral nature of the free market and the suffering it can cause, that is not true. Even the classic neoliberal villains — F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman — knew that the government would need to reign in the excesses of the free market and catch people who fall through the cracks. That’s why they proposed things like a strong welfare state, health and safety regulations, and price controls on natural monopolies.
It’s true that many of these latter ideas didn’t make it into the political platforms of Republicans like Goldwater and Reagan. But that changed with Bill Clinton in the 90s and Barack Obama a decade later, both of whom embraced the idea of a social safety net while also believing in the generative power of free markets.
Today, conventional wisdom says that this neoliberal consensus is dead. Pundits have taken the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right to mean that Americans no longer believe in the virtues of free markets. Even Pete Buttigieg, who was once described as “a neoliberal corporatist rat from hell,” has been making the case that neoliberalism is on life support.
But anybody writing a eulogy for neoliberalism fundamentally misunderstands American public opinion. No matter how much venom critics spit at neoliberalism, most Americans will never regard it with the same contempt they do. This recent poll by Eschelon Insights shows why. In a battery of eight questions to test the “neoliberal” attitudes of Americans, respondents were all over the map. People support neo-liberal coded ideas like free trade and the child tax credit but oppose ones like increasing immigration and growing the housing supply through deregulation.
Why are Americans all over the map when it comes to neoliberal ideas? Because most people are not concerned with obscure political philosophies or ideological frameworks. Most people just support politicians and policies that they think will make their lives better. They want a strong economy with job opportunities, medical care when they need it, a home to live in, good schools for their children, and the freedom to live how they see fit.
Do we need to kill neoliberalism to achieve all that? Most Americans couldn’t care less.
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A century ago used the following as the de facto definition of "Capitalism" but it works just as well for "Neoliberalism" today.
Neoliberalism is any part of the status quo the speaker doesn't like.
One consequence is that by forming coalitions against "Neoliberalism", it's possible to paper over the fact that people don't agree on which parts of the status quo they don't like, or what they want to replace it with.
First, the poll excerpt you included was fascinating and illustrative. Second, your comments on definitions being hard! but important are appreciated. The “woke” example couldn’t be more aptly placed. If I could be granted any three wishes right now, they would all be related to getting Lauren Boebert to articulate how the national debt ceiling and the contents of its debate is “fake news.” Personally, I thought “fake news” was juvenile when first uttered, disturbing when repeated given its close relationship to the ether, and now just a head-scratcher. Did the King James Version of the Dictionary get circulated while I was sleeping on some Merriam-Webster copy circa pre-Guggenheim’s press?? I would contend Trump was/is so effective with his base for his commitment to saying non-things when supposedly saying something. Which was fun and interesting but apparently it’s lasting. Given we missed our moment to have Trump explain the pharmacological benefits of oral Lysol as they might intersect with virology and human pathophysiology, I’d personally like to stop the next woke linguist among us to label a headline, eventual economic imperative, or congressional process as “fake news,” ask them to define what in the real that means, and how in the wondrous world of diction it applies.