Hey, Progressive: Who Are You Calling a Neoliberal?
I recently wrote a book about the late 1960s, so maybe the reason I don’t like the word “neoliberal” being deployed by some on the left against a wide variety of Democrats of varying views stems from my memory of my mother’s reaction when I first played her Phil Ochs’ song, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.”
I was a senior in high school in early 1967, a couple of years after Ochs had written the song. My parents were against the Vietnam War, which was the issue that divided Democratic Cold Warriors from those in the anti-war movement. But my mother loved the word “liberal,” which she identified with civil rights, Women Strike For Peace, Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Deal.
When she heard the first verse of the song—in which Ochs’ cartoon liberal says he cried when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot but that Malcolm X “got what was coming”—my mother was pissed. “It’s not fair to say that all liberals are hypocrites,” she complained.
I shrugged off her wounded tone as a symptom of the generation gap. At an anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., Students for a Democratic Society President Carl Oglesby made the distinction between New Deal liberals and pro-war “corporate liberalism.” He knew that some would claim he sounded anti-American: “To these, I say: ‘Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.’ ”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/hey-progressive-calling-neoliberal/
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