Must-Read: Fred Clark: That Time I Was the Evil Opposite of Neoliberalism

Must-Read: Fred Clark: That Time I Was the Evil Opposite of Neoliberalism: “Bill Clinton was a Neoliberal. No, no, no…

…Bill Clinton was a betrayal of Neoliberalism. Or neither. Or both. For some the ‘Neo’ just meant ‘I’m a liberal who wants our agenda to carry more states than Mondale and Dukakis’… a semantic way of avoiding the negative associations the right had worked so hard to affix to the word liberal…. For others, the term ‘Neo-liberal’ was a way of avoiding the ethical and economic baggage of their own anti-liberal legacy…. The word was contested, with competing meanings by competing claimants for ownership of it. Neoliberalism was large, it encompassed multitudes. And it still does, which is why George Monbiot can write this: ‘Neoliberalism: The ideology at the root of all our problems.’ That’s a fascinating, but muddling essay. He sometimes focuses the meaning of this word, ‘Neoliberalism,’ to mean basically what we used to call laissez-faire capitalism–unfettered free markets, Voodoo economics, the 1980s writ large, etc. But he also uses the term to refer to something more vast and expansive. That headline is really his definition of ‘Neoliberalism’–it is the word he uses to refer to ‘the ideology at the root of all our problems,’ a general name for Everything Bad. The vague generality of that fuzzes up the diagnostic usefulness of Monbiot’s essay. It’s like a doctor saying, ‘You’re unwell.’ That may be true enough, but it’s not particularly helpful.

Back in the ’90s, ownership of the term ‘Neoliberal’ was in many ways a tug of war between proponents of laissez-faire capitalism and, well, just plain liberals. Liberals embraced the term as a way of avoiding the negative connotations of being called liberals. And laissez-faire capitalists sought to claim the term as a way of avoiding the negative connotations of admitting that they were laissez-faire capitalists. My sense is the LFCs probably won that battle. (That’s bad news for many of the liberals who tried to claim the term ‘Neoliberal’ in the late 20th century, because they’re now stuck with a label retroactively defined by their primary opponents and critics.)… Now… the word is contested in pretty much the opposite way…. It used to be laissez-faire capitalist ‘Neoliberals’ attacking liberals because, in their view, anything short of pure free-market ideology was indistinguishable from a ‘statist model.’ Now those same liberals are accused of being ‘Neoliberals’ by those who say that anything short of statist models is indistinguishable from laissez-faire capitalism. Neither of those accusations strikes me as helpful.

And but so, my point here actually is this: You should read the 1977 original edition of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and not the later editions in which the publisher sought to appease that book’s “Neoliberal” critics by revising the policy discussions in its final section.

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