General Discussion

messaging devise for the left. The 'neoliberalism' rubric implicates the Democratic Party in the rightward drift of American politics that has in reality been caused by the Republican Party's growing radicalism. It yolks the two parties together into a capitalist Establishment, against which socialism offers the only clear alternative.

"By relabeling self-identified liberals as 'neoliberals,' their critics on the left accuse them of betraying the historical liberal cause. ... Its basic claim is that from the New Deal through the Great Society the Democratic Party espoused a set of values defined by, or at the very least consistent with, social democracy or socialism. Then, starting in the 1970s a coterie of neoliberal elites hijacked the party and redirected its course toward a brand of social liberalism targeted to elites and hostile to the interests of the poor and the working class. The first and most obvious problem with this version of history is that there is little reason to believe that the Democratic Party has actually moved right on economic issues. ... This chart indicates that the Democrats have not moved right since the New Deal era at all.

"Democrats ... have never been a left-wing labor-dominated socialist party. (Union membership peaked in 1955, two decades before the party's supposed neoliberal turn ... [and working class whites began leaving the Democratic Party during the '60s, also before the supposed Democratic neoliberal turn].) The widespread notion that 'neoliberals' have captured the modern Democratic Party and broken from its historical mission plays upon nostalgia for a long gone era, when the real thing was messier and more compromised... . ... But it is the political climate that has grown more hostile to Democratic Party economic liberalism. The party's ideological orientation has barely changed."

It's "an attempt to win an argument with an epithet"

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/how-neoliberalism-became-the-lefts-favorite-insult