The Meaning of "Neoliberal"

   The word "neoliberal" goes flying around Twitter a lot and there appears to be some disagreement on what it means. If you ask the typical establishment Democrat online what it means these days you are told it's a dog whistle that racists use to reference African-American Democrats. It's simply not true. It's one of a large numbers of lies spread online by disgruntled supporters of Hillary Clinton in 2016 because they couldn't understand why so many actual voters didn't automatically fall in line. Since Hillary Clinton's belief in the free market economy over "big government" intervention in the messy work of making the capitalist sausage fits very well into the dictionary definition of the word, and Bernie Sanders biggest fans tend to have an interest in how the economy actually works, it's only natural someone would start to call Hillary "neoliberal." There's a clear delineation between "neoliberal" and "democratic socialist" that has real meaning to someone who studies economics, sociology or political science. So let's stat with the dictionary defition.

   Neoliberalism, n: A modified form of liberalism tending to favor free market capitalism.

   That's a bit of a mouthful isn't it? So now you may want to know what "liberalism" is.

   Liberalism, n: The holding of liberal views.

   Shorter, but still circular reasoning. So if Hillary Clinton holds liberal views she's a liberal and if her liberal views favor free market capitalism she's a neoliberal? I can follow that. Still, what are liberal views?

   There is an economic and a political component which can have opposing meanings. In sociopolitical terms a "classical liberal" believes in a doctrine of natural rights and artificial responsibilities. The artificial responsibilities form a "social contract" by which stakeholders in a society agree to the norms by which the society is governed in return for the resulting government's agreement to protect their natural rights. The stakeholders accept an artificial responsibility not to violate each other's natural rights and the government is the arbiter of their contract. While this precise framing of government has never actually played out this way, this social contract theory was the fundamental underpinning of England's Glorious Revolution and the later American Revolution. The Founding Fathers were so sure that their revolution followed naturally on the principles of the first that they even named themselves the Whigs, after the anti-Jacobite faction of the Glorious Revolution, and called their political opponents "Tories" after the anti-Williamite faction the earlier Whigs fought against.

   The results of both revolutions were what could be rather generously called upper middle class societies with a sense of the personal liberties that should be enjoyed by the upper middle class. Free landowning males could vote for representatives. Those representatives administered the government so as to respect the political and economic rights of all the free landowning males in the new political order.

   What about poor people, women, and various minority groups? That's a very good question with a simply awful answer. They didn't get a say. That was the fundamental flaw of the original liberal ideal. It really didn't include anyone who wasn't a stakeholder in the social contract. That's the flaw in liberalism. The profoundly liberal administration of John Quincy Adams was able to create an "American System" for internal improvements that would create gainful employment and sew the nascent world power together but they were unable to address the idea for many poor white tenant farmers and laborers that they were being used by the elite.

   The result was a political transition into what historians call "Jacksonian Democracy." They expanded on the natural rights theory and liberal doctrine to claim that all white men were equal under the law. The effect was to enlarge the pool of stakeholders in liberal society to address the complaints of the white underclass but leave the same underlying problem. The government was still only for those it defined as its stakeholders. Things actually became worse for women and minority groups. Jacksonian Democracy removed previous administrations' half-hearted checks on the Native American genocide and resulted in the disastrous Trail of Tears. While the liberal Founding Fathers paid lip service to antislavery, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren declared slavery a positive social good. The poor could vote, but their new political rights did not come with corresponding economic and social uplift unless they chose to join in the terrible migration west. Ironically it's the libertarian writer Rose Wilder Lane whose books show the real horror westbound pioneers faced in trying to better themselves.

   Subversive and revolutionary thinkers continued to agitate for change without a great deal of result for years to come. The Civil War served to end slavery. The corresponding attempt to integrate freed slaves into the political society of the postwar South in Reconstruction ultimately failed because white men were unwilling to consider black men stakeholders in their liberal society.

   Even as Reconstruction was being killed by racist whites seeking to regain their status as liberal stakeholders in the South, white women and African-Americans initially allied in a grand attempt to secure their civil rights in the North. The greatest irony is these efforts failed in the home states of the antiracist politicians attempting to impose political integration on the South. Liberalism had won again and the stakeholders were still on top.

   Real change wouldn't start to come after the Great Depression and WWII. The New Deal created a new economic contract to stand aside the political contract. A social safety net was built in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. In the post-WWI era, liberals attempted to prove they could build a free and inclusive society by combining formal legal equality with a wide range of programs designed to ameliorate prejudice and poverty. Yet the stakeholders were still running things and every advance came with a degree of effort that felt greater than previous advances. Stakeholder reactions began to blame African-Americans for things like "urban decay", "crime", and "ghettoization" despite the fact that it was African-Americans who were primarily the victims of these things.

   Under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the economic reforms of the New Deal and Great Society were undone in a way that massively benefited stakeholers at the expense of the working class and minorities. Under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, policies that were "tough on crime" devastated people already suffering from financial deregulation and tax cuts. Private enterprise would profit massively from what became a prion-for-profit law enforcement regime. Under George W. Bush a massive war against some of the poorest people in the world, that still hasn't ended, completely exhausted whatever budgetary gains had come from the projects of Bush I and Clinton. A Great Recession and an austerity program that could have been designed by the conservatives who made the New Deal necessary destroyed African-American and working class wealth in this country.

   It is the broad trend of American stakeholders crushing minorities, the working class and those who do not conform to the rules of the social contract between the stakeholders that we mean by "neoliberalism."