- So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.
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: I skimmed the wiki article on neoconservatism and when I read this sentence: 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?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.
Neoconservatism was initiated by the repudiation of the New Deal coalition by the.............
The "liberal" in neoliberal is the same as the "liberal" in "classical liberal", that is it's a reactionary revival of Adam Smith/John Locke style economic thought from the dawn of capitalism before we saw the gilded age and the cruelties of the industrial revolution and learned to be as skeptical of industry as Enlightenment revolutionaries were of aristocrats. Ideology shapes policy, addressing individual policies is just playing whack-a-mole when what you really need to do is smash the whack-a-mole machine.
I don't see how you can smash the "whack-a-mole" machine because I don't see there as being one. People don't identify as "neoliberal", people who are anti-neoliberal identify other people as neoliberal. For instance, ISIS has a "whack-a-mole" machine for it's ideology in Syria, and people identify with ISIS when they commit muslim extremist activities. All issues aside with leveling Syria into a parking lot (let's say we instead just transport it to another dimension so we don't go down that discussion path), even with Raqqa gone and all ISIS strongholds gone, it's still an ideology that people can identify to and will still have people pledging allegiance to it. Same with Anonymous, it's an idea that hacktivists can attach to, with no real "whack-a-mole machine" that can stop it. However, in this case, we aren't even dealing with something that has a name that people identify with. Politicians don't pass "neoliberal" laws and claim it a victory for neoliberalism. What one person calls neoliberal someone might call neoconservative, and other might call crypto-facist, or another might call anti-progressive. So I'm guessing the idea is to put a name to a bunch of people who fall into your respective category for neoliberal, and then get people to rally against the concept. Then people will say they aren't neoliberals, because they never identified with it in the past nor ever even heard of it. It sounds like the very beginnings of a neo-McCarthyism. You start by labeling people who really are as you classify (contrary to what McCarthy was doing, hence "neo"), then everyone else changes the definition ever so slightly and then everyone just starts finger pointing at each other until we've accomplished nothing. I don't see the benefit whatsoever.
It's irrelevant what people identify as; sometimes people have ideas and sometimes ideas have people, otherwise propaganda and marketing wouldn't work. Ideology is the things that seem like common sense. Give it a name and it stops being common sense and becomes a thing that can be studied, criticized, and hopefully, filed away with the divine right of kings under "wtf were we thinking?"
