Commenters in a diary posted earlier objected, not for the first time, about the use of the word “neoliberal.” Specifically it was said to be a word without a meaning.
I’m not going to argue about the lexical or scholarly meanings applied to the term, or how it has changed over time.
Both the scholarly and the common usage of the term focus it on Margaret Thatcher, who famously said, in all capitals, “There Is No Alternative.” Meaning, there was no alternative to allowing multinational corporations to flex their muscles and reshape laws and customs to suit themselves. This is the structure of the world we live in today. The corporations own the place and run the place, the rest of us just live here and service their needs.
When I use the word “neoliberal,” I refer to “Washington Consensus Liberalism,” which focuses on achieving progressive ends in a world dominated by multinational corporations, but never contemplates challenging the domination of multinational corporations. Neoliberals make deals for affordable HIV drugs for underdeveloped countries, for example, but they have little or no interest in using government power to curb monopolistic drug pricing abuses in the domestic market.
Washington Consensus Liberalism is not a right wing ideology, in any sense. But it never offered an escape from the Age of Reagan — there couldn’t be an escape as long as There Is No Alternative was accepted as true. Thus the neoconservative Fukuyama could write about The End Of History, because only the details could possibly ever change.
When people say “the things Democrats fight for aren’t Neoliberal,” that’s mostly but not entirely true, Neoliberalism isn’t what Democrats (even centrist Democrats) fight for, Neoliberalism is the system that we are told to work within. We can’t prosecute the banks, we’re told. We can’t displace the health insurance companies. Or challenge the drug companies, or inconvenience the software industry. Those things are too hard so be reasonable and choose fights we can win. You’ll piss off the donors, so go along and get along.
(This diary I wrote in 2011 got a total of 3 recommends.) I wrote that three years after Barack Obama complained about how the Democrats had given up on being the “party of ideas,” and five years before a highly qualified mainstream Democrat lost the presidential election to yellow snow. One of those problems is now solved: the Age of Reagan seems to finally be over. But the problem of finding an alternative to the neoliberal order remains.