krebscycle

“Neoliberal” was coined by Milton Friedman in the 1950s as a friendly seeming marketing rebrand for the same old conservative economics policies. What Friedman and his colleagues really meant was that working people needed to be made to suffer to accept lower living standards through a rerun of conservative economic policies that caused the Great Depression. As JK Galbraith said: “Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried”.

By the late 1970s, Economics departments and “think tanks” made this junk marketable enough for Ronald Reagan to put some of it into practice and the USA acquired tent cities of homeless people, manufacturing collapsed, unemployment went up, wages fell, unions were crushed, and government deficits skyrocketed. The clinching argument for conservative economics, however, didn’t come from Econ departments, it came from Republican politicians who sold the lie that most “welfare” was going to Black people who didn’t want to work. The result was a generation of Republican dominance as white voters chose to impoverish themselves to spite Black people. So a group of Democratic Party politicians called themselves “neoliberal” which, to put it crudely, was intended to mean: “liberalism but no more welfare to, you know, them.”

This worked well enough to get Bill Clinton in office and Democrats did not return to the Jim Crow era in real life, but pushed hard to make social welfare programs less triggering to fragile white voters. For example, much of the old “welfare” was replaced by “Earned Income Tax Credit” which sounds better since it even has “earned” in the name. The country prospered but the remains of the US “left” hated it and wanted to argue, falsely, that “Bush=Gore” and Democrats and Republicans are the same. Why? Well for one, Democrats are not socialists, but also because Democrats incremental progress on prosperity and social justice makes leftwing ideologists less relevant . So what’s a nice sophisticated sounding word that would put some fake intellectual depth into that story? Now you can wryly remark “Democrats and Republicans are different sides of the same neoliberal coin” instead of actually having to try to argue that the party of the Civil Rights Act, ACA, and Social Security is the same as the party of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Katrina, 9/11, 01/06, and the Reagan, Bush, and Trump recessions.

“Neoliberal” is well suited to this type of serial mendacity because “liberal” in British English means what Americans call “conservative“, something Milton Friedman surely knew and tried to leverage and the “leftists” also exploit. In American English, “liberal” usually means like JFK and FDR or pretty much what is called “social democrat” elsewhere plus civil rights which is integral to US liberalism, just as racism is integral to US conservatism. US liberals generally support civil rights, economic security, government programs to help the poor, public education, and regulation of markets. Unions, high wages, voting rights, and social security are characteristic of American “liberalism”. In most of the rest of the world, particularly the UK, “liberalism” means austerity, “trickle down”, and few regulations on business (but subsidies for incumbent business and regulations on labor, for sure). Republicans are UK liberal. Since the “neo” doesn’t mean anything at all, if you shuffle the cards between UK and US definitions Democrats and Republicans are, in fact, both “neoliberal”.

See also economics on the slant and Confessions of an ex-leftist who became a mindless Obot.