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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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They were doing pretty good until they blamed everything on neoliberalism, what a fucking joke
Edit: If the wikipedia page wasn't clear enough, the 14 definitions and comments below should show that the term "neoliberalism" is a broken dog whistle at best. You might as well go outside and yell at the clouds while you're at it.
Is it? Neoliberalism describes a modern conservative movement closely aligned to libertarian philosophy. Privatization, elimination of government programs, tax reduction, laissez-faire capitalism are all under the neoliberal umbrella.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
Wow, that is not what I expected Neoliberalism to mean. Thank you for the lesson. When I read about Neo-(x-political-term) I generally think of new ideas around it, not ideas reaching back to WWII. My biggest concern after reading your link is:
Also, the last few paragraphs of Current Usage emphasize it's use as a dog whistle:
and
I still think it would serve us all to be more precise about what exactly is failing us.
I think that in the minds of Friedman, Hayek, Mises et. al. (who coined the term neoliberal after WW2), it was meant to marry modern pro-market economic ideas (the "neo" part) with classically liberal social ideals, reaching back to the Enlightenment. I think they intended it as a counter to socialism, which combined anti-market ideas with regressive ideas around social and civil liberty (at least, in practical application in the wake of WW2).
But yes, in modern parlance it is often a slur aimed at pro-corporate capitalist kleptocracy.
Everything was new at some point. Things are named relative to when they happen, not relative to when you hear about them.
Important to mention that Neoliberalism is a therm not really used by people by people who defend liberty, capitalism and free market policies. It's not something academic for example. Basically you won't find liberals calling themselves neoliberals.
It is often used by people that does not agree with liberalism, sometimes in a pejorative way, other times to aggregate a group of heterogeneous people, and sometimes mixing different policies and aspects of modern western societies.
Citing the Wikipedia article that explains and has sources on this:
I mean, sure, the term can be misused. But "neoliberal" was adopted by Hayek, Mises, Friedman et. al. to describe their philosophy of liberty, capitalism, and free market policies. So it's not completely inappropriate to associate "neoliberal" with those principles.
Do you have sources on this? I did a quick research and the only thing that I found was this article that argues that Neoliberalism definition changed over time and it would be an anachronism to take how the therm is used today (for example in this post) to define what they mean at the time, and the closest definition for them would be liberals, not neoliberals anymore. Which is totally fine given the time that has passed, and specially how political definitions are hard to define without context (example on how we consider left and right nowadays and 200 years ago for example, its not the same ideas)
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/history-of-neoliberal-meaning/528276/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/
...
... etc ...
The actual work of Milton Friedman and co. should work best for that, they don't hide it! ;)
"Neoliberalism and Its Prospects". 1951
https://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/57816
You won’t find liberals calling themselves neoliberals because the term itself was always used to refer to anticommunism after the defeat of the axis powers.