These days, the meaning of “neoliberal” has become fuzzy. But it has a long history of association with the Democratic Party.
https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2019/6/11/18660240/democrats-neoliberalism
The fallout from the 2016 election has created many surreal moments for historians of American politics and parties, but surely one of the oddest has been the introduction of the term
neoliberal into the popular discourse. Even stranger still is that it has become a pejorative largely lobbed by the left less at Republicans and more at
Democrats. As neoliberal has come to describe a wide range of figures, from
Bill and Hillary Clinton to
Ezra Klein and
Ta-Nehisi Coates, its meaning has become stretched thin and caused fuzziness and disagreement.
This muddle of meanings creates an opportunity to seek a more precise understanding of what I call “Democratic neoliberalism.”
It is actually not the first time Democrats have been called neoliberal. In the early 1980s, the term emerged to describe a group of figures also called the Watergate Babies, Atari Democrats, and New Democrats, many of whom eventually became affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). In this iteration, the term neoliberal was embraced not as opprobrium. Rather, it used a form of self-description and differentiation to imply that they were “new Democrats.” In 1982, Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters published “
A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto,” which aimed to lay out the core principles of this group; two years later, journalist Randall Rothenberg wrote a book called
The Neoliberals that sought to codify and celebrate this cohort’s ascendency.
The DLC and its allies have largely received attention from political historians for their electoral strategy instead of their policies. Yet, even more than electoral politics, this group had an impact on shaping the ideas and policy priorities of the Democratic Party in key issues of economic growth, technology, and poverty. They also created a series of initiatives that sought to fuse these arenas together in lasting ways. The realm of policies is where parties can have an impact that reaches beyond elections to shape the lives of individual people and intensify structures and patterns of inequality. It thus points to the importance of expanding the study of US political parties writ large, beyond simply an examination of political strategy and electoral returns and instead thinking about the ways in which parties come to reflect and shape ideas and policy. It also demonstrates the importance of treating neoliberalism less as an epithet and more as a historical development.
Unlike their counterparts in fields like sociology and geography and even in other historical subfields, historians of the United States were long reluctant to adopt the term “neoliberal.” Many still argue that the neologism has become, in the words of Daniel Rodgers, “a
linguistic omnivore” that is anachronistic and potentially “cannibalizing.” In the past few years, scholars of 20th-century American political history, however, have increasingly embraced neoliberalism and sought to understand its historical evolution. Building and drawing on the work of influential theorists like
David Harvey, these inquiries have been important in the efforts to understand the relationship between capitalism and politics and the power dynamics with them. Yet these accounts have largely depicted the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s as inextricably intertwined with conservative ascent and the Reagan Revolution, and situated the Clinton era and the rise of the New Democrats as a piece of a larger story about the dominance of the free market and the retreat of government. This approach flattened and obscured the important ways that the Clintons and other New Democrats’ promotion of the market and the role of government was distinct from Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and their followers.
The principles and policies Clinton and the DLC espoused were not solely a defensive reaction to the Republican Party or merely a strategic attempt to pull the Democratic Party to the center. Rather, their vision represents parts of a coherent ideology that sought to both maintain and reformulate key aspects of liberalism itself. In The Neoliberals, Rothenberg observed that “neoliberals are trying to change the ideas that underlie Democratic politics.” Taking his claim seriously provides a means to think about how this group of figures achieved that goal and came to permanently transform the agenda and ideas of the Democratic Party.
From Watergate Babies to New Democrats..........
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A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto
By Charles Peters; Charles Peters is the editor of The Washington Monthly.
September 5, 1982
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/09/05/a-neo-liberals-manifesto/21cf41ca-e60e-404e-9a66-124592c9f70d/?utm_term=.ce3a69efb8e6
NEO-LIBERALISM is a terrible name for an interesting, if embryonic, movement. As the sole culprit at the christening, I hereby attest to the innocence of the rest of the faithful. They deserve something better, because they are a remarkable group of people. The best known are three promising senators: Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gary Hart of Colorado and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. The ones I know best are my fellow journalists, including James Fallows and Gregg Easterbrook of The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley and Robert M. Kaus of Harper's, Nicholas Lemann and Joseph Nocera of Texas Monthly, and Randall Rothenberg of New Jersey Monthly. But there are many others, ranging from an academic economist like MIT's Lester Thurow to a mayor like Houston's Kathy Whitmire to a governor like Arizona's Bruce Babbitt. There's even a cell over at that citadel of traditional liberalism, The New Republic.
While we are united by a different spirit and a different style of thought, none of these people should be held responsible for all of what follows. Practicing politicians in particular should be presumed innocent of the more controversial positions. When I use the first person plural, it usually means some but not all of us, and occasionally it may mean just me.
If neo-conservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.
We have found these responses not only weren't helping but were often hampering us in confronting the problems that were beginning to cripple the nation in the 1970s: declining productivity; the closed factories and potholed roads that betrayed decaying plant and infrastructure; inefficient and unaccountable public agencies that were eroding confidence in government; a military with too many weapons that didn't work and too few people from the upper classes in its ranks; and a politics of selfishness symbolized by an explosion of political action committees devoted to the interests of single groups.
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A Neoliberal Says It’s Time for Neoliberals to Pack It In
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/03/a-neoliberal-says-its-time-for-neoliberals-to-pack-it-in/
My fellow neoliberal shill Brad DeLong
has declared that it’s time for us to pass the baton to “our colleagues on the left.” As it happens, I agree with him in practice because I think it’s time for boomers to retire and turn over the reins to Xers and Millennials, who are generally somewhat to the left of us oldsters. Beyond that, though, there’s less here than meets the eye. DeLong says there are three reasons he thinks neoliberals should fade into the background:
Political: The original guiding spirit of American neoliberalism was the idea that Democrats had moved too far to the left and gotten punished for it with the election of Ronald Reagan. For years, neoliberals believed that if the party could be moved toward the center, it would be possible to make deals with Republicans that would lead to better governance. Needless to say, that didn’t work: Republicans, it turned out, were simply emboldened to move even further to the right. They showed absolutely no intention of compromising in any way with Democrats.
But this is old news. Charlie Peters, the godfather of political neoliberalism, conceded it publicly long ago. For at least the past decade, there’s been no reason at all to believe that the current Republican Party would ever compromise with Democrats no matter how moderate their proposals. Anyone who has believed this since George W. Bush was president was deluding themselves. Anyone who has believed it since 2009, when Obamacare was being negotiated, is an idiot. There’s nothing about this that separates neoliberals from anyone else these days.
Policy: DeLong suggests that the folks to his left are basically just social democrats like him who “could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not.” But with the unfortunate exception of its jihad against organized labor, neoliberals have been social democrats from the start. Bill Clinton tried to pass universal health care, after all, and I think Barack Obama would have done the same if he’d thought there was any chance of passing it.
So this is nothing new either. The question is, does DeLong intend to go along in areas where his neoliberal ideas are in conflict with the AOC wing of the Democratic Party?
He plainly does not.
The world has changed: “We learned more about the world. I could be confident in 2005 that [recession] stabilization should be the responsibility of the Federal Reserve. That you look at something like laser-eye surgery or rapid technological progress in hearing aids, you can kind of think that keeping a market in the most innovative parts of health care would be a good thing. So something like an insurance-plus-exchange system would be a good thing to have in America as a whole. It’s much harder to believe in those things now.”
But has the world really changed? I don’t think so—not yet, anyway. I’ll bet DeLong still believes in these two things, but now understands that Republicans will undermine them at every opportunity. That makes it Job 1 to destroy the current incarnation of the GOP, and the best way to do that is to have unity on the left. But if and when that’s been accomplished, I’ll bet he still thinks the Fed should be primarily in charge of fighting recessions. We just need FOMC members who agree.
At the risk of overanalyzing this, I think DeLong is still a neoliberal and has no intention of sitting back and letting progressives run wild. He has simply changed the target of his coalition building. Instead of compromising to bring in Republicans, he wants to compromise to bring in lefties. Now, this is not nothing: instead of compromising to the right, he now wants to compromise to the left. But I suspect that this simply means DeLong has moved to the left over the past couple of decades, just like lots of liberals.
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Third Way
The Third Way is a position akin to centrism that tries to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of some centre-right and centrist economic and some centre-left social policies. The Third Way was created as a re-evaluation of political policies within various centre-left progressive movements in response to doubt regarding the economic viability of the state and the overuse of economic interventionist policies that had previously been popularized by Keynesianism, but which at that time contrasted with the rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right. The Third Way is promoted by social liberals and some social democratic parties.
Major Third Way social democratic proponent Tony Blair claimed that the socialism he advocated was different from traditional conceptions of socialism and said: "My kind of socialism is a set of values based around notions of social justice. [...] Socialism as a rigid form of economic determinism has ended, and rightly". Blair referred to it as a "social-ism" involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent and advocated social justice, social cohesion, equal worth of each citizen and equal opportunity. Third Way social democratic theorist Anthony Giddens has said that the Third Way rejects the traditional conception of socialism and instead accepts the conception of socialism as conceived of by Anthony Crosland as an ethical doctrine that views social democratic governments as having achieved a viable ethical socialism by removing the unjust elements of capitalism by providing social welfare and other policies and that contemporary socialism has outgrown the Marxist claim for the need of the abolition of capitalism. In 2009, Blair publicly declared support for a "new capitalism".
The Third Way supports the pursuit of greater egalitarianism in society through action to increase the distribution of skills, capacities and productive endowments while rejecting income redistribution as the means to achieve this. It emphasises commitment to balanced budgets, providing equal opportunity which is combined with an emphasis on personal responsibility, the decentralisation of government power to the lowest level possible, encouragement and promotion of public–private partnerships, improving labour supply, investment in human development, preserving of social capital and protection of the environment. However, specific definitions of Third Way policies may differ between Europe and the United States. The Third Way has been criticised by certain conservatives, liberals and libertarians who advocate laissez-faire capitalism. It has also been heavily criticised by other social democrats and in particular democratic socialists, anarchists and communists as a betrayal of left-wing values, with some analysts characterising the Third Way as an effectively neoliberal movement.
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