Liberals are pro-capitalism, which is the ultimate mechanism for inequality.
“Neoliberalism” isn’t a pejorative, it’s a political philosophy that has dominated the Western world for about 50 years, though it has roots much further back. It is a philosophy embraced by both Republicans and Democrats. It’s about privatization of services, lowering taxes, and deregulating corporations. It’s why we have for profit healthcare in the US, for example.
That’s a completely US-centric view. All your liberals might be capitalists, elsewhere, various forms of social liberalism are very much alive and kicking. It’s one half of the ingredient in the EU’s compromise of “social market economy”: It’s a thing both social liberals and democratic socialists can lay claim to and, indeed, in policy terms there’s gigantic spaces of overlap. Parliament-wise it’s most directly represented mostly by Green/EFA but floats in various forms and shades in pretty much all parties, especially Renew though the neolibs are also part of that one.
It’s also ancient, dating back to the mid-1800s, bringing you things such as credit unions.
From a different angle: Marx was wrong, there’s indeed petite bourgeois who are capable of class consciousness. Also, understanding macroeconomics and how trickle down is bullshit. They may be millionaires but that’s still a billion away from a billion, they want people to have money in their pockets so you have money to visit their cinema or whatever.
Also once upon a time neoliberalism meant ordoliberalism but that’s a historical note. The current use refers to BS that indeed makes the word itself a pejorative, just as “shit” is a pejorative for shit.
I’d be curious what liberal party in what country you mean.
AFAIK the liberal parties in Europe like Germany, France and UK want exactly what the US neoliberals want, to dismantle the social equality state, deregulation, private schools, private healthcare etc. But they are usually smaller third parties after Social Democrats and Conservatives. But even the Christian Conservatives in e.g. Germany are more socialist than the third party liberals, and to the left of the Democrats in the US.
Of course, ever since the “Third Way” after the fall of the USSR and Clinton, the social democratic parties of Europe also have become far more neoliberal.
The question is really who’s liberty? The liberation of the masses from economic exploitation? Or the liberty of the capitalists to exploit the masses? There is absolutely no doubt what is meant today with liberalism.
And their virtue signalling you can mostly ignore. Why would they want to solve an issue they could run on next election?
I’d be curious what liberal party in what country you mean.
AFAIK the liberal parties in Europe like Germany, France and UK want exactly what the US neoliberals want
Taking Germany as an example: The FDP, once upon a time, had a large social-liberal wing and was in coalition with the SPD, but that’s long gone by now they’re firmly neoliberal. The Greens are social-liberal, the Pirates are, and so is Volt. A social-liberal party that’s part of Renew instead of Greens/EFA would be Radikale Venstre.
The question is really who’s liberty? The liberation of the masses from economic exploitation? Or the liberty of the capitalists to exploit the masses? There is absolutely no doubt what is meant today with liberalism.
Part of the stated goals of the feed-in tariff system the German Greens cooked up was, aside from saving the planet by boosting renewables, to de-monopolise the market, to distribute ownership of the means of electricity production wider, and they indeed were successful we now have plenty of wind mills here that are owned by municipal-level cooperatives. Couple of farmers, the local machine shop, couple of pensioners, that’s enough own capital to convince the local cooperative and public banks to chime in with a credit, build the thing. Left to pure environmentalism they might’ve passed laws requiring the big monopolists to build more renewables, a more traditional leftist approach would be to build state-owned renewables, the Greens instead created, through smart regulation, market conditions that made it possible for small fish to get into the fray, out-flanking the monopolists.
That is, you missed something in your dichotomy: The liberation of the small fish from the accumulation power of the big fish. That policy is 110% ordoliberali: Regulate the market such that market failures are corrected. Neoliberals generally do the opposite, remove regulation that prevents failures because that pleases their monopolist overlords, or even regulate to fail though at that point it probably should be called straight-up kleptocracy.
And their virtue signalling you can mostly ignore. Why would they want to solve an issue they could run on next election?
Now you’re being a doomer. Yes, that happens, generally in politics not limited to any spectrum, but it’s also self-destructive as voters will consider you unfit to rule. It’s not like we’re limited to two parties over here, things can and do shift.
I believe your argument is reductive, and ignores the complexities of the politics of people who call themselves liberals. Neoliberalism is not a coherent political or economic ideology, it’s an insult for moderates used by leftists. Most liberals are not ideological; they pick their policy preferences pragmatically, though nobody can truly claim to be perfectly unbiased and non-ideological.
And if you had argued to me in 2010 that democrats and republicans can both be described as “neoliberals”, I might agree with you, but since at LEAST 2015, republicans have completely turned their back on the most basic aspects of liberalism, becoming the anti-immigrant, anti-trade, isolationist party with no respect for the rule of law or the principles of equality or personal freedom. There was maybe a 10 year period in which republicans paid lip service to these ideals throughout the 1990s, but today Republicans can better be described by Hungarian President Victor Orban’s prescription for “illiberal democracy”, though lately they’re not too hot about democracy either.
Republicans, in contrast to liberals, believe in enforcing cultural conservatism through state power, state intervention in markets to benefit in-groups, majoritarian ruling with very slim electoral margins to the detriment of marginalized groups or opposition parties, and a general hostility to freedom of speech or the free press
Yes, liberals ARE pro-capitalism, but capitalism has been the ultimate mechanism for REDUCING inequality. Since the 1970s (the heyday of so-called neoliberalism), the number of people living in extreme poverty has gone from rougly 50% to about 10% today, accelerating in the 1990s with the downfall of communism across Europe.
To reiterate: thanks to free trade and capitalism, most of the world no longer lives in extreme poverty for the first time in human history. It is in very wealthy countries where we are able to take this for granted because we’ve been living very high standards of living since the end of the 2nd world war, which has coincided with a large gap in wealth equality. However, the living standard of the average American today is still MUCH higher than the living standards of the average American in the 1960s or 1950s.
Healthcare in the United States is not actually really a free market. The specifics of how our system works lives and dies by the letter of the law. What many blame on deregulation is in fact due to specific regulations which were written by the insurance companies. To be clear: this is called regulatory capture, which is NOT a principle of liberalism. Liberals believe in a fair and unbiased bureaucracy which serves the public and not special interest groups. The American healthcare system is a failure to live up to liberal principles. This can be said of most other policy failures in the US: housing has exploded in cost because of regulatory capture in zoning commissions, reducing supply.
Neoliberalism is a far right ideology. That’s just a fact you can look up yourself. It has almost nothing to do with classical or social liberalism which is about freeing people.
Neoliberalism is a far right ideology. That’s just a fact you can look up yourself
I’m sorry but you’re simply wrong. “Neoliberalism is a far right ideology” is inherently NOT a fact; it’s a normative statement. It’s an opinion. You can’t present your opinions (or those of people who think like you) as facts. If I said “Neoliberalism is a moderate or even left wing ideology”, I would also say that that is not a fact; it’s my opinion, and the opinion of people who think like me
You should probably read more. This is from Wikipedia. Neoliberalism is about freeing capital not people.
Neoliberalism has become an increasingly prevalent term in recent decades.[16][17][18][19] It has been a significant factor in the proliferation of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them.[20][21] Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending. These policies are designed to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[22][23][24][25] Additionally, the neoliberal project is oriented towards the establishment of institutions and is inherently political in nature, extending beyond mere economic considerations.[26]
The term is rarely used by proponents of free-market policies.[27] When the term entered into common academic use during the 1980s in association with Augusto Pinochet’s economic reforms in Chile, it quickly acquired negative connotations and was employed principally by critics of market reform and laissez-faire capitalism. Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of economists working with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Greenspan.[7][28][29] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism became established as common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused into the English-language study of political economy.[7] By 1994, the term entered global circulation and scholarship about it has grown over the last few decades
The article only says what I’m saying: it’s a term given to certain people as a pejorative, and not an actual ideological program endorsed by people who are labeled by it. You’re telling me that there is a fundamental similarity between Augusto Pinochet, who threw communists out of helicopters, and the US democratic party, which is categorically unwilling to inflict any kind of political violence against their opposition? Pinochet was not a neoliberal, he was a fascist, and if you can’t tell the difference, then I encourage you to not only read more, but to get outside more and talk to people who have actually grown up in fascist and communist countries and see if they think that living in the US is anything like growing up in a fascist state.
To try to label the policies of Pinochet and the policies of the US democrats with the same term is either an expression of ignorance or privilege. Again, neoliberalism is a term which was made up by liberal arts and philosophy departments, not economists
No, you are saying that if someone disagrees with you, it is because they are misinformed. This is a kind of narcissism: you believe that your opinions are so correct and unshakably true that you cannot conceive of a world in which someone with equal access to information legitimately disagrees with you. You assume that if someone else disagrees with you, then they obviously haven’t read up on the matter; that they are ignorant, stupid, or malicious. It IS a personal attack, because you’re not attacking my words, you’re attacking the speaker of the word because you’ve spent so long in an internet echo chamber that you are no longer capable of imagining a reality in which you might be wrong.
Conversely I could say that if your first recourse to someone disagreeing with you is to copy paste a Wikipedia article as proof that a term merely exists, I would wager you probably haven’t read much about the topic other than mean internet comments. I would further wager that probably most of what you read is mean internet comments
You can disagree with me all you want, you cant simply redefine a words meaning because it doesn’t fit your standard of a definition or hurts your feelers. That’s what the right does till words have no definitions or meaning.
I have to assume your here to sow descent in discourse.
Liberals are pro-capitalism, which is the ultimate mechanism for inequality.
“Neoliberalism” isn’t a pejorative, it’s a political philosophy that has dominated the Western world for about 50 years, though it has roots much further back. It is a philosophy embraced by both Republicans and Democrats. It’s about privatization of services, lowering taxes, and deregulating corporations. It’s why we have for profit healthcare in the US, for example.
That’s a completely US-centric view. All your liberals might be capitalists, elsewhere, various forms of social liberalism are very much alive and kicking. It’s one half of the ingredient in the EU’s compromise of “social market economy”: It’s a thing both social liberals and democratic socialists can lay claim to and, indeed, in policy terms there’s gigantic spaces of overlap. Parliament-wise it’s most directly represented mostly by Green/EFA but floats in various forms and shades in pretty much all parties, especially Renew though the neolibs are also part of that one.
It’s also ancient, dating back to the mid-1800s, bringing you things such as credit unions.
From a different angle: Marx was wrong, there’s indeed petite bourgeois who are capable of class consciousness. Also, understanding macroeconomics and how trickle down is bullshit. They may be millionaires but that’s still a billion away from a billion, they want people to have money in their pockets so you have money to visit their cinema or whatever.
Also once upon a time neoliberalism meant ordoliberalism but that’s a historical note. The current use refers to BS that indeed makes the word itself a pejorative, just as “shit” is a pejorative for shit.
I’d be curious what liberal party in what country you mean.
AFAIK the liberal parties in Europe like Germany, France and UK want exactly what the US neoliberals want, to dismantle the social equality state, deregulation, private schools, private healthcare etc. But they are usually smaller third parties after Social Democrats and Conservatives. But even the Christian Conservatives in e.g. Germany are more socialist than the third party liberals, and to the left of the Democrats in the US.
Of course, ever since the “Third Way” after the fall of the USSR and Clinton, the social democratic parties of Europe also have become far more neoliberal.
The question is really who’s liberty? The liberation of the masses from economic exploitation? Or the liberty of the capitalists to exploit the masses? There is absolutely no doubt what is meant today with liberalism.
And their virtue signalling you can mostly ignore. Why would they want to solve an issue they could run on next election?
Taking Germany as an example: The FDP, once upon a time, had a large social-liberal wing and was in coalition with the SPD, but that’s long gone by now they’re firmly neoliberal. The Greens are social-liberal, the Pirates are, and so is Volt. A social-liberal party that’s part of Renew instead of Greens/EFA would be Radikale Venstre.
Part of the stated goals of the feed-in tariff system the German Greens cooked up was, aside from saving the planet by boosting renewables, to de-monopolise the market, to distribute ownership of the means of electricity production wider, and they indeed were successful we now have plenty of wind mills here that are owned by municipal-level cooperatives. Couple of farmers, the local machine shop, couple of pensioners, that’s enough own capital to convince the local cooperative and public banks to chime in with a credit, build the thing. Left to pure environmentalism they might’ve passed laws requiring the big monopolists to build more renewables, a more traditional leftist approach would be to build state-owned renewables, the Greens instead created, through smart regulation, market conditions that made it possible for small fish to get into the fray, out-flanking the monopolists.
That is, you missed something in your dichotomy: The liberation of the small fish from the accumulation power of the big fish. That policy is 110% ordoliberali: Regulate the market such that market failures are corrected. Neoliberals generally do the opposite, remove regulation that prevents failures because that pleases their monopolist overlords, or even regulate to fail though at that point it probably should be called straight-up kleptocracy.
Now you’re being a doomer. Yes, that happens, generally in politics not limited to any spectrum, but it’s also self-destructive as voters will consider you unfit to rule. It’s not like we’re limited to two parties over here, things can and do shift.
I believe your argument is reductive, and ignores the complexities of the politics of people who call themselves liberals. Neoliberalism is not a coherent political or economic ideology, it’s an insult for moderates used by leftists. Most liberals are not ideological; they pick their policy preferences pragmatically, though nobody can truly claim to be perfectly unbiased and non-ideological.
And if you had argued to me in 2010 that democrats and republicans can both be described as “neoliberals”, I might agree with you, but since at LEAST 2015, republicans have completely turned their back on the most basic aspects of liberalism, becoming the anti-immigrant, anti-trade, isolationist party with no respect for the rule of law or the principles of equality or personal freedom. There was maybe a 10 year period in which republicans paid lip service to these ideals throughout the 1990s, but today Republicans can better be described by Hungarian President Victor Orban’s prescription for “illiberal democracy”, though lately they’re not too hot about democracy either.
Republicans, in contrast to liberals, believe in enforcing cultural conservatism through state power, state intervention in markets to benefit in-groups, majoritarian ruling with very slim electoral margins to the detriment of marginalized groups or opposition parties, and a general hostility to freedom of speech or the free press
Yes, liberals ARE pro-capitalism, but capitalism has been the ultimate mechanism for REDUCING inequality. Since the 1970s (the heyday of so-called neoliberalism), the number of people living in extreme poverty has gone from rougly 50% to about 10% today, accelerating in the 1990s with the downfall of communism across Europe.
To reiterate: thanks to free trade and capitalism, most of the world no longer lives in extreme poverty for the first time in human history. It is in very wealthy countries where we are able to take this for granted because we’ve been living very high standards of living since the end of the 2nd world war, which has coincided with a large gap in wealth equality. However, the living standard of the average American today is still MUCH higher than the living standards of the average American in the 1960s or 1950s.
Healthcare in the United States is not actually really a free market. The specifics of how our system works lives and dies by the letter of the law. What many blame on deregulation is in fact due to specific regulations which were written by the insurance companies. To be clear: this is called regulatory capture, which is NOT a principle of liberalism. Liberals believe in a fair and unbiased bureaucracy which serves the public and not special interest groups. The American healthcare system is a failure to live up to liberal principles. This can be said of most other policy failures in the US: housing has exploded in cost because of regulatory capture in zoning commissions, reducing supply.
Words have definitions often with histories.
Neoliberalism is a far right ideology. That’s just a fact you can look up yourself. It has almost nothing to do with classical or social liberalism which is about freeing people.
I’m sorry but you’re simply wrong. “Neoliberalism is a far right ideology” is inherently NOT a fact; it’s a normative statement. It’s an opinion. You can’t present your opinions (or those of people who think like you) as facts. If I said “Neoliberalism is a moderate or even left wing ideology”, I would also say that that is not a fact; it’s my opinion, and the opinion of people who think like me
Neoliberalism is very much a far right ideology.
You should probably read more. This is from Wikipedia. Neoliberalism is about freeing capital not people.
Neoliberalism has become an increasingly prevalent term in recent decades.[16][17][18][19] It has been a significant factor in the proliferation of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them.[20][21] Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending. These policies are designed to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[22][23][24][25] Additionally, the neoliberal project is oriented towards the establishment of institutions and is inherently political in nature, extending beyond mere economic considerations.[26]
The term is rarely used by proponents of free-market policies.[27] When the term entered into common academic use during the 1980s in association with Augusto Pinochet’s economic reforms in Chile, it quickly acquired negative connotations and was employed principally by critics of market reform and laissez-faire capitalism. Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of economists working with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Greenspan.[7][28][29] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism became established as common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused into the English-language study of political economy.[7] By 1994, the term entered global circulation and scholarship about it has grown over the last few decades
Grow up. Attack ideas, not people.
The article only says what I’m saying: it’s a term given to certain people as a pejorative, and not an actual ideological program endorsed by people who are labeled by it. You’re telling me that there is a fundamental similarity between Augusto Pinochet, who threw communists out of helicopters, and the US democratic party, which is categorically unwilling to inflict any kind of political violence against their opposition? Pinochet was not a neoliberal, he was a fascist, and if you can’t tell the difference, then I encourage you to not only read more, but to get outside more and talk to people who have actually grown up in fascist and communist countries and see if they think that living in the US is anything like growing up in a fascist state.
To try to label the policies of Pinochet and the policies of the US democrats with the same term is either an expression of ignorance or privilege. Again, neoliberalism is a term which was made up by liberal arts and philosophy departments, not economists
If someone telling you to read more to properly inform yourself is a personal attack id say your pretty fragile along with your argument.
No, you are saying that if someone disagrees with you, it is because they are misinformed. This is a kind of narcissism: you believe that your opinions are so correct and unshakably true that you cannot conceive of a world in which someone with equal access to information legitimately disagrees with you. You assume that if someone else disagrees with you, then they obviously haven’t read up on the matter; that they are ignorant, stupid, or malicious. It IS a personal attack, because you’re not attacking my words, you’re attacking the speaker of the word because you’ve spent so long in an internet echo chamber that you are no longer capable of imagining a reality in which you might be wrong.
Conversely I could say that if your first recourse to someone disagreeing with you is to copy paste a Wikipedia article as proof that a term merely exists, I would wager you probably haven’t read much about the topic other than mean internet comments. I would further wager that probably most of what you read is mean internet comments
You can disagree with me all you want, you cant simply redefine a words meaning because it doesn’t fit your standard of a definition or hurts your feelers. That’s what the right does till words have no definitions or meaning.
I have to assume your here to sow descent in discourse.