I've been refraining from saying anything about this until now since everyone here is definitely anti-neoliberal, but I was definitely in the camp of "wtf is neoliberalism" and didn't feel like looking it up. This article has completely confused me even further now.

I read this thinking how exactly is this any different from neoconservatism, another term I never fully understood that dominated arguments about politics for a long time during Bush's administration, so I went and tried to figure out what neoconservatism is just now because I felt I knew too little about that term as well and didn't care when the term was being used all over the place in politics.

From the article about neoliberalism:

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

I skimmed the wiki article on neoconservatism and when I read this sentence:

Neoconservatism was initiated by the repudiation of the New Deal coalition by the.............

I just want to tear my eyes out.

I really don't care for these terms anymore. You can probably trail all of these back to Feudalism or some other political science term as well, but the more I hear these terms come out the less I actually care about people's argument. If you have a cohesive argument against a policy or a law or an agenda, you really shouldn't need to fill it with these completely asinine terms.

I know this will be an unpopular post, but I have to say that throwing these terms around isn't helping anything other than immediately making people not like you because they see themselves as either a liberal, and you are against their liberal ideals (which isn't the point of neoliberalism I understand), or they see themselves as a conservative, and they see "liberal" and "neo" and just say "fuck the liberals" or something or maybe they support or hate it I can't even keep track anymore. Then you have the independents like me who have no idea what you're talking about and then just ignore you.

These terms just muddy everything up in these discussions, and I'm not sure what benefit is being provided by classifying ideas this way. Why can't we just look at each policy individually and see the mistakes and merits for the policy that it is? Or did I just make an anti-neoliberal statement and validate your cause?