zlacker

What does “neoliberal” mean in this context?

>>throwa+(OP)
I think of neoliberalism and neoconservativism as offshoots of corporatism, which is the idea that government can most efficiently serve the people by protecting the interests of corporations above all else.

This leads to the idea that regulatory capture is economically efficient (“Who is better qualified to regulate industry than successful industrialists?”)

It also leads to things like banning class action law suits, allowing binding arbitration, and allowing individuals to sign away arbitrary rights by implicitly accepting non-negotiated contracts they haven’t even seen.

Oakland has commercial enforcement zones, where private police enforce the law. The idea is that business owners weren’t getting a good deal by paying taxes to fund the police, because it was subsidizing law enforcement in residential areas. Instead, the merchants hire their own police, and pay less taxes. Oakland’s (mostly poor, black) residents fund the police that protect them out of their own taxes.

Anyway, you get the idea. Back to your question:

Neoconservatives generally think corporatism is best achieved by dismantling the government (“repeal Obamacare”).

Neoliberals think it is best achieved by restructuring it (mandate health insurance for all).

(Contrast that with the populists in that debate. They want to dismantle the health insurance industry and replace it with medicare.)

Usually, when people talk about moderates in the US, they mean corporatists. The MAGA crowd are mostly “right wing” populists (xenophobic, “America first”, bring back factory jobs), the BLM types tend to be “left wing” populists.

If you look up corporatism, you’ll see it is a shortened form of “corporate fascism”. I don’t think that term is particularly constructive, though it is accurate: the MAGA and BLM movements both accuse the establishment of being fascist.

One side targets neoliberals, the other, neocons. As General Mattis pointed out last week, divided we fall.

>>hedora+s4
Please don't quote that reptile. Of all the reasons to resign from the currently-reigning administration, he chose the fact that Trump had decided to stop killing Syrian children. Not a good look. If the war media is refocusing its attention on him, we can expect he'll be pimping more atrocities real soon. After all the public must be distracted from its current concerns, otherwise we might spend some money on something besides armaments and prisons.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/politics/james-mattis-resigna...

>>hedora+s4
The label neoconservative primarily concerns a niche political movement in foreign affairs and defense. It was largely a small group of highly influential Washington insiders who spent most of their careers at the Defense Department, State Department, and CIA. Ideologically they were realists, but mostly in the context of foreign affairs. In terms of domestic policy they were all over the board, though they were often typically described as socially liberal (i.e. no anti-abortion activists). Discussing their domestic policy preferences is a little non-sensical because they didn't really care about domestic policy. Most of them were Republican, many of their financial backers were Democratic, but the party affiliations were mostly irrelevant except that in terms of appointments their power flowed primarily through Republican administrations.

Well known neoconservatives include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jim Woolsey, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others. Outside of government, almost to a person they all circulated among a small group of think tanks and lobbying organizations in Washington, DC, one of which I used to work at while in college, and I watched every one of the aforementioned, and many more, come in and out of the office at various times.

I also think discussing the domestic policy principles of neoliberals is a little non-sensical. Neoliberalism, IMO, is best described as a manifest consequence of the rightward shift in Western politics from the late 1970s to the present time. After Margaret Thatcher's win in the U.K., liberals became increasingly disfavored by the electorate across the West. Neoliberals are politicians who recognized that conservatives controlled the narrative--small government, fewer regulations, pro-business, etc--and ran on political platforms that reflected that shift.[1] Ideologically they almost all supported traditional liberal policies--social, economic, etc--but understood you couldn't actually win national elections on those same platforms any longer. IOW, neoliberalism isn't an ideology, it's natural selection.

Liberals today love to sh_t on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair for rolling back the social safety net, increasing police enforcement, etc. But they have amnesia.[1] The alternatives to Clinton and Blair weren't more liberal policies, they were continuing conservative electoral wins. People forget that two years into Clinton's presidency the GOP won the House and Senate for the first time in ~50 years, and that Clinton lost to Bush not because the electorate was more liberal, but because Bush wasn't conservative enough.

It's amazing that even after Trump's election and even after Brexit liberals are still under the delusion that more liberal policies can win elections. It doesn't matter that individual voters' particular preferences skew liberal; when you package them all up into a platform the controlling political narrative is that they represent big government, and big government is bad. Full stop. And what's the alternative to big government? Whatever it is, it will tend to benefit large corporations because the collective action problem doesn't go away, and the next largest organizations that are capable of marshaling a huge amount of human and monetary resources will fill in the vacuum left by a receding government.

Going forward I don't know what will happen. With the rise of populism any kind of coherent platform, principled or opportunistic, seems unnecessary and irrelevant. We do seem to be at an inflection point, but only time will tell.

[1] I'm sure younger people today might say, "how could you possibly support anything other than smaller government, ceteris paribus." I'm not so old as to be able to tell you first-hand how older generations thought, but as I understand it, it wasn't that you preferred bigger government, it's just that you didn't concern yourself much with where a policy sat on the big government/small government axis. Issues were contextualized differently. Conservatives took control of the narrative by recontextualizing the issues and changing the metrics by which people judged the appropriateness and viability of policies. They were so successful that most people today across the political spectrum have completely internalized that shift. Not just in the U.S., but globally. How did they do it globally? Because their recontextualization didn't happen in a vacuum. Few would call Deng Xiaoping a neoliberal (or Mahathir Mohamad, or many others Asian leaders through the succeeding decades), but clearly an appreciation for market-based policies was an emerging global phenomenon. But it was U.K. and U.S. conservatives in particular (though not necessarily exclusively) who built a political narrative around that shift and provided examples of how to leverage it in democratic societies so that popular support for, e.g., privatization gathered momentum independent of the actual benefits, promoting the disintegration of institutions that didn't benefit from a diminished governmental role.

>>throwa+(OP)
Liberalism was originally the abolition of feudal restrictions on free trade and wage labor. Neoliberalism is the removal of various newer restrictions on that, including: social-democratic laws that protect workers and raise the standard of living, and protective trade laws that protect countries' local industries (large industry in poor manufacturing countries, for instance, or small farmers like in Mexico, who have been wiped out by US agriculture).

China and the US have recently taken an anti-neoliberal turn, in fact the neoliberal era is beginning to end. Both Trump and Jinping have been pretty protectionist.

>>jessau+07
I’m mot a huge fan of him, and am extremely anti-war.

However, the US’s withdrawal from Syria is a continuing humanitarian disaster that has spread into neighboring countries.

>>hedora+6f4
We don't destroy nations by leaving them (which we haven't done in Syria's case; there are still USA troops fighting there [0]), we destroy them by occupying and slaughtering in the first place. Keep in mind that the "gas attacks" were staged false-flag this-is-how-all-our-wars-start bullshit, which overruled-from-top OPCW investigations made clear. [1] Calling oneself "extremely anti-war" while parroting military-industrial complex submarine interventionist propaganda is fairly ridiculous. Killing more children in Syria wouldn't have saved the lives of Syrian children.

[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/07/max-blumenthal-on-baghdad...

[1] https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-ch...