Lmao
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/13qoll9/i_updated_this_meme_to_be_more_reflective_of_what/
i thought the whole point of neoliberalism was to totally dismantle the welfare state and all social services. basically libertarianism but with a massive police state and none of the "civil liberties".
I remember a few years ago, centrist dem pundits like Jonathan Chait and Joy Reid were complaining that the word “neoliberal” was losing meaning because the left was abusing it and using it too broadly as a pejorative. They lamented that Hillary Clinton and Cory Booker were being lumped in with Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan.
I guess I do agree with them on this one, to be honest. “Neoliberal” should mean Reagan and Thatcher and Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. It should mean people who think that there are no such things as public goods or market failures, and literally every single product, good, and service in existence is better provided by private companies in a market system than by the public sector.
But in the last 7-8 years (and yeah, I do think this is largely the fault of socialist shitposters) “neoliberalism” has come to be understood as “any support for market systems at all, even only partially”. Now some non-leftists have reacted by embracing the term “neoliberal”, except most of the people doing that are really just mixed economy “good government” liberals who liked Obama and believe that markets are good for some things and public programs are good for others. Most of them probably hold LBJ and Paul Krugman in higher regard than Reagan and Hayek.
Man, I wish we could get back to Keynesian economics. That's how fucking bad it is :doomer:
I like the view that Hayek got so owned by Keynes that the former just tried to extract vengeance and that is the main drive of him and also why he tried to influence allies more instead of changing his views.
Not a Marxist view but fun enough for musicals.
But in the last 7-8 years (and yeah, I do think this is largely the fault of socialist shitposters) “neoliberalism” has come to be understood as “any support for market systems at all, even only partially”.
It's also literally an astroturfing campaign by a think tank to rehabilitate the image of "centre-left politics", a.k.a. something that gives the impression of being capitalism + treats for everyone, but actually has support of companies as its main priority.
If you give your Socdems the illusion that you support for example railway construction, and propagandize them with "the state is inefficient, the private sector should do it", then they'll support you if you privatize railways even if that fails to materialize even 1 Km of new lines. And if it is done after all, then you can be smug and out can convince them that the next step is to lower taxes for the rich so that they can give you treats and promise that they'll make your life better.
It's an ingenious strategy that worked because of their ideology being basically feel-good conservatism, now but better™ and as can be expected it created some incredibly smug people that find a defense for anything the government does, no matter how vile or in your face fuck you politics.
I did notice that wikipedia and some "economics" studies who are close to the Chicago econ people do not follow the sociological analysis of neoliberalism but reduce it too much and use neoliberalism for:
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any economic thought and policy system in that isn't laissez faire
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which is therefore some kind of ordo liberalism
Which of course is like saying Winter is when it isn't so hot that water is liquid.
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Clinton's husband devastated welfare while he was in office. The Democrats don't deregulate and privatize as ruthlessly as they want to because their base will revolt and throw them out if they actually just executed their agenda. I had to double check I was on Hexbear and not :reddit-logo: because this is a a take.
Now some non-leftists have reacted by embracing the term “neoliberal”,
Who cares?
except most of the people doing that are really just mixed economy “good government” liberals
No one listens to them and they're too stupid or ideologically brain poisoned to understand the actual positions and goals of their beloved political leaders
Reagan and Hayek.
Reagan is the arch-Satan of the Left because he's so cartoonishly evil, but Neo-liberal hollowing out of society started before him, with Carter being the first president to really start implementing Neoliberal policies, and they've continued apace since him.
It should mean people who think that there are no such things as public goods or market failures, and literally every single product, good, and service in existence is better provided by private companies in a market system than by the public sector.
This describes neither Reagan nor Thatcher, and I will point you to their approach on police, the military, intelligence agencies, etc. for examples.
Lumping Buttigieg in with Reagan is ultimately pretty well-justified. The first neoliberal was Jimmy Carter and nearly 100% of prominent politicians in the US since 1980 have been very unambiguously playing for that team, whatever partisan feuding might also occur.
Yeah but you’ve gotta do all that while paying lip service to the ideals of social democracy
Oh shit oh God, you've summoned the insufferable libs to whitesplain anti-blackness in the PoC community.
This cartoon is about fairly distributing limited resources and the neoliberals are just like "We would simply multiply the available resources by 20x."
This cartoon is about fairly distributing limited resources and the neoliberals are just like “We would simply multiply the available resources by 20x.”
It's easy to think that way when you multiply them by taking the rest from Global South countries.
Pretty telling that they look at equity and see it as shit and in need of infinite growth
with a strong social safety net
i.e. the things we as neoliberals oppose
Nah, the fools posting there don't.
Their politicians do oppose that (but don't question it. What are you, some kind of tankie?)
The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don't really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded.
I gotta finish the Disco Elysium lib run I've started
Neoliberals really love to talk about how much they support the social safety net as a general concept while opposing any expansion of the welfare state. It’s really weird. Like, they ostensibly believe everything that social democrats believe, but if you try to call them social democrats they’ll correct you, and if you tell them they clearly don’t support those policies, they will also correct you.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from such a poorly-defined and incoherent belief system, but it’s still bewildering.
Self-proclaimed Neoliberals are the Vaushites of the Socdems, I suppose
“Strong social safety net” and then it’s just two guys with an old fishing net holding it like a foot off the ground like that’s gonna catch anyone
I think they depicted good what nets they have in mind, those that keep you outside the fence and might not help at all but have you crash into the ground. That part at least is honest.
Neolibs claim to want a strong social safety net?
Aren't they Chicago school kids?
okay. why is there homelessness? this is an open-book pop quiz. you have 5 minutes.
The market provides bountiful riches for all, except when it doesn't but then that is not the market's fault but rather lack of personal responsibility on behalf of the individual.
They simply chose to not pay for a home. If they are saying they can’tafford it, they should choose a higher paying job.
You may say “but what about the children?!” That’s why we are getting rid of child labor laws!
Lmao in capitalism there would be guards and barbed wire to prevent anyone from watching from over the fence.
Just a taller fence, really. One that kind kf makes the whole experience worse for everyone but ensurea everyone has to pay.
In Chicago there are, or were, some buildings that overlooked the ball fields and the owners would charge people to let them sit on the roof and watch the game.
This also makes me think about how, due to broadcasting agreements, it's not actually possible to watch a lot of games now.
They still can’t afford tickets but there’s more garbage laying around to climb on
I don’t get the strong social safety net. Neoliberalism is a movement of privatization and financialization
Neoliberalism is a movement of privatization and financialization
and lying
You'll notice that the net, as designed, is cheap and functionally useless
Quite funny but it would be hard for me to choose a favorite one I see a new funny emote every day I come to this site lol
:do-not-do-this: :frothingfash: :the-doohickey:
all classics :chefs-kiss:
Tbf most of the posters on that sub are just politically illiterate and consider themselves 'liberal', because that's one of the two options in the US mainstream (three if you count fascism).
So they see 'neo' in front of 'liberal' and think, 'well, i' m liberal, and a millenial so also pretty new, guess that makes me a neoliberal' without ever doing the effort of actually understanding what neoliberalism actually means.
I am doubtful about this, why the fuck be on a specific "neoliberal" sub? It's run by a thinktank with a specific ideology and mostly has posters that it's trained on the talking points of that ideology. Generic liberals in the modern age are neoliberals, a classical liberal in the modern day is a freak (and libertarians are indeed freaks).
I once saw a post on that cursed sub titled ”Why did you become a neoliberal?” and there were many ”I thought conservatives sucked and that Obama was cool” type responses, so there are definitely people on there who have no clue what neoliberalism even is.
It was created as a direct response to r/chapotraphouse. The only coherent ideology is anti-communism
I'm reasonably sure the sub predates the CTH sub by several years. If anything, it was created in response to the Ron Paul bros that flooded the site back in '08.
Yes and no. It was originally created and run by a certain mod for several years before becoming popular but was largely dead. The modern subreddit started when people in the r/badeconomics sub decided to make a subreddit for memes, so they reached out to the mod of r/neoliberal and gained control of the subreddit. The original community for the modern subreddit came from people posting on the r/badeconomics megathread and consisted of people who self-identified as neoliberal, largely had academic experience with orthodox economics, and, due to being young, college-educated PMCs, held otherwise left-of-centre views on social issues. Basically the “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” type except instead of their fiscal conservatism being the boater kind, it was the shitposting memes based on what they learned in econ classes kind. Consequently they didn’t really identify with libertarians, and especially the ancaps, who tend to be more crankish from the perspective of orthodox academic economics and would join in on making fun of them for buying heroin at walmart and the NAP and particularly their obsession with gold. They also didn’t get along with conservatives due to their position that “welfare queens are good actually”. What they wanted was a free market neoliberal economy, erring slightly on the side of technocratic intervention where “necessary”, and undergirded by a generous welfare system, with no regard to the political economy of how neoliberalism always accompanies austerity in practice, since their entire worldview grew out of shitposting economics memes. All of this had the effect of making them appear to the average redditor as more moderate and reasonable than libertarians (they were not), and more progressive than conservatives (they would certainly think that of themselves) while still being anticommunist and different from “those dumb socialists on r/CTH that don’t even know basic economics vevuzela”. And so a large part of the growth of the modern subreddit was driven by a reaction to chapotraphouse
tl;dr: it was a dead subreddit for a long time, then revived as an economics shitposting sub, and then grew in popularity partly as a reaction to r/CTH
edit: it may even be the case that the founders of the modern subreddit envisioned it as a direct response to r/CTH. It’s been a while so I don’t really remember
I was, unfortunately, there for the early days so I experienced this all first-hand
Good question. That part I’m not so sure about but I think it came later, although I remember that early on they did reach out to some think tank for cross-promotion but (to my knowledge) they weren’t really involved. A significant turning point though came when the original group of mods started talking in their chat about how much they wanted to kill palestinians with drones, and then the head mod, the one who had rebooted the subreddit, sent screenshots of that conversation to the mods of r/chapotraphouse in an attempt to provoke them into some kind of shitposting war. The mods of r/CTH then just publicly posted the screenshots, which caused the mods of r/neoliberal to resign and a lot of the original power users to go back to r/badeconomics. The next wave of mods had joined the subreddit after it had been rebooted and were more like the lanyard type so I think that’s when the think tanks started getting involved.
"The Neoliberal Project" eventually partnered with a thinktank called "The Progressive Policy Institute", but it was already part of something called "The Center for New Liberalism", effectively the parent company.
It is accidentally a great commentary on Neoliberalism how there's this incestuous clusterfuck of psy-op non-profits that make it hard to track who does what.
ah yes, which is why after 40-50 years of the Reagan administration and near completely unregulated capitalism, homelessness and poverty are completely gone from the US
Actually, they're only not gone because the stupid progressives keep getting in the way of Real Reform by doing Socialism. Meanwhile, the evil conservatives won't let Neoliberals have the veto proof supermajorities in all branches of government that the Founding Fathers declared necessary to do anything, because they are too stupid to let liberals win.
