Neoliberalism.
There. I said it. And the spell-checker in my text editor got mad at me. For once, this spell-checker and I are in full agreement on a matter that isn't a typo.
In contrast, consider the Carlinist's version of the Lord's Prayer: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. George Carlin's seven words. There is peace and beauty in George Carlin's seven words. It is like a mantra. A calming mantra. Or, it can be used as the ultimate exclamation. Behold the perfection of the Carlinist's Prayer!
On the other hand, "neoliberalism?" No, I don't like that word.
How often have you read that word on this blog? In this post, and that's it. I checked the indices in both of my books. Nope. I don't think I have ever used it in a published article or conference paper either. It doesn't get used in American politics panels at academic political science conferences where professors and grad students get together to talk research in heavily jargon-laden, speechifying events. "Neoliberalism" is just not a word we use with any frequency. Why not? It has no real relevance for most of American politics. If you want to describe what happens here, there is better terminology.
And yet, this post needed to happen eventually. "Neoliberalism" is one of the favorite buzzwords for political dialog outside of American politics, and scholars of non-American politics use the word more often than I use Carlin's seven favorite words. It's like their version of Tourette's Syndrome, or something. Neoliberalism this, neoliberalism, that. Pass the tea and crumpets, neoliberalism!
This leads to... confusion. And occasional annoyance.
You see, those of us who study American politics professionally know the history of the word, "liberal." We can trace it out for you, beginning with its etymological root in the word, "liberty." Liberalism, in its original form, properly called "classical liberalism" in some quarters, is an ideology based on the notion that the primary value is freedom, with freedom being the state that exists until someone infringes on it (what Isaiah Berlin would later call "negative liberty"). Classical liberalism, can best be understood by reading theorists like John Stuart Mill, John Locke and those types of people. Basically, don't tell me what to do. Or... what I can't do. Remember the etymological root: liberty.
As times changed, issues changed and the ideological disputes within America changed. As that happened, trying to use the same word in a different context led to messiness. Language is annoying that way. Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between types of liberty was the distinction between "negative" liberty and "positive" liberty. Negative liberty is the freedom that you have when nobody stops you from doing X. To have positive liberty, you must have the capacity to take advantage of your negative liberty. Everyone has the negative liberty to sleep out in the cold (here in Cleveland, anyway!), but to be able to sleep in a fancy hotel, you need the money to pay for it. In order to have the positive liberty to sleep in that hotel, you need resources.
Modern liberalism, in the American context, focuses on the positive conception of liberty, by Berlin's definition. Those of us who study American politics professionally frequently have to explain the history of words like "liberal" and how that usage has changed over time to focus on a "positive" conception of liberty as the issues in political debate have changed.
So, "liberal," in American politics, doesn't mean the absence of government, or deregulation, or anything like that. It means a welfare state, redistribution, and a bunch of other stuff because if people don't have the resources to take advantage of the government not telling them they can't buy X, the negative liberty of that doesn't matter. Liberalism, in the modern American context, is about "positive liberty." Isaiah Berlin. And every time I type that, I have to correct myself and not type "Irving Berlin." Remember, I'm a music guy too.
Anywho, does that mean that the conservatives in American politics are the "classical liberals?" Can we equate them with "neoliberalism," or whatever the hell the people who use that wretched word mean? No. No.
There once was a man who wasn't from Nantucket. Milton Friedman was actually from New York, but might as well have been born at the University of Chicago. Once upon a time, conservative economists drew their ideology from his writings. Essentially, he wrote that the government's attempts to alleviate unemployment and such were misguided. The unemployment rate would always return to a natural rate regardless of what you do, but inflation was different, and disconnected from unemployment. If the government kept meddling to alleviate unemployment, all that would happen in the long run is that inflation would go up and you'd have stagflation. Just keep the government out of the business cycle, and try to keep inflation down to a manageable level through monetary policy. That's Friedman, in very brief form. Friedman called himself a "liberal," politically. He was actually a libertarian, but he took his inspiration from the old-time theorists, who just wanted government to keep out of everyone's way. "Liberal," in a classical sense, which now (and even when he used the word) means libertarian.
Conservatism has deviated pretty far from Friedman, even in economic terms, as you can tell from the goldbuggery that permeates the movement. Milton Friedman thought that the gold standard was basically the dumbest thing ever, and these days, there's a lot of goldbuggery in the conservative movement. That's just one example, without even getting into the fact that conservatism holds that there should be government intervention in the social realm, but the basic point is that Friedman is not really all that influential on the GOP. They just appeal to the name because he predicted stagflation in the '70s.
Friedman, though, was a libertarian, who just used the word, "liberal." Not neoliberal. "Liberal." Dude called himself a liberal because he was reading the old stuff and he was fussy about terminology. What a jackass, m'I right?
Anyway, what is going on with "conservatives?" In American politics, they draw their history back to Edmund Burke rather than John Locke. Remember Burke? He was the aristocratic dude who said the American Revolution was cool, but the Frenchies were nuts. Why? Short version: aristocracy=good, overturning social order=bad. The French Revolution didn't meet Burke's standards because the rabble were rising up against the aristocracy with no clue what would happen next. When you do that, bad things can happen. In fact, bad things did happen. Reign of Terror, anyone? Not good times. The American Revolution was different. Yeah, we were separating ourselves from a monarchy, but it wasn't a bunch of rabble rising up. It was... different aristocrats who were going to take over. They set up a proto-democracy, which involved risk, and Burke was not a fan of risk, but a bunch of guillotine-happy peasants rising up was different from a bunch of aristocrats saying "we think we're the aristocrats who should be running the show, rather than you bunch of aristocrats across an ocean." Yes, I am simplifying greatly, and Burke was way more sophisticated than that, but this is a Saturday morning blog post. Read Burke. This is one paragraph, and you can't do justice to him with a paragraph.
Anyway, the point is that Burke was pro-aristocracy, and anti-rabble. He liked order and stability and hierarchy and all that. American conservatives trace their roots less to Locke and Mill and those dudes than to Burke. American conservatism is, first and foremost, hierarchical. This is tricky because if you listen to their language, they use the language of libertarianism. Damn near any conservative politician, if asked to describe their ideology, will describe libertarianism rather than conservatism. Blah, blah, small government! Blah, blah, liberty! Pot legalization? Fuck no! And please stop asking me about gay marriage, 'cuz we're trying to avoid that topic now. We had fun with that one through about 2008 or so, but HEY! LOOK OVER THERE! AN MS-13 GANG MEMBER! No more of your fake news questions!
Where was I? Oh, yes. Edmund Burke. American conservatism is fundamentally about maintaining a hierarchical structure. To the degree that there is any common historical thread, that's it. All of the language that you hear in other contexts about "traditional values," etc.? That's where you hear the roots going back to Burke. What does tradition have to do with economics or hierarchy? Not a whole lot, except to the extent that we have a capitalist tradition in the US, by virtue of the US being only about two and a half centuries old, rather than European countries, which have roots in pre-capitalist systems, variations of socialism, etc. Adam Smith. 1776! Same year! And yes, capitalism does create hierarchies. Add some traditionalism to that, and you have Burke defending non-state intervention in the economy on the basis of tradition and hierarchy rather than anything rooted in general philosophies of "liberty."
This means the conservative movement is not, fundamentally, rooted in classical liberalism. It isn't rooted in any philosophy at all. Even traditionalism isn't a philosophy. Conservatism is, in fact, a coalition. It is a coalition of those who want low taxes, etc., and don't care about social issues because they are on the business side, and those who want fundamentalist christian beliefs written into law. That works as a sort of log roll, but like everything else in politics, it's more of a convenient coalition than anything else. And no, Matt Grossman & David Hopkins, this isn't about ideological purity because there's no coherent ideology. It's just a convenient coalition that works for now and will, like all coalitions, fall apart eventually, thank you very much William Butler Yeats. It doesn't even have to be a "centre" to not hold.
Low taxes and deregulation in the American context are not rooted in classical liberal values. They are rooted in hierarchy. They are rooted in Burke. And American liberalism is pro-economic intervention because American liberals are rooted in what Isaiah Berlin termed a "positive" conception of liberty. That means nobody in American politics derives an opposition to regulation or taxes or anything like that from classical conceptions of liberty.
That is why nobody closely studying American politics-- no scholar of American politics, no serious analyst-- uses the term, "neoliberalism" to discuss what happens here. It's a bullshit term, and you shouldn't use it either. I am often disturbed by the number of people-- with Ph.D.s-- who don't seem to understand that the word, "liberal," actually means something different in modern American politics than in other contexts, and get very confused, and sanctimonious about how I misuse the word. Language is annoying. I wish this didn't happen. I get pissed off at people when they start trying to change definitions, but it's 2019. A lot of changes have already happened, and that means words just have multiple definitions. The answer, linguistically, is for us to ensure that we are working with the same definition when an existing word has multiple definitions. In the modern American context, the word, "liberal," has a meaning. That meaning began to evolve into its current form during the New Deal. Not the "Green New Deal," which... [facepalm] but FDR's New Deal. Welfare state, redistribution, positive liberty, and blah, blah, blah. Then, eventually, you add in civil rights, and other stuff, but that's a complicated process. Read Hans Noel's Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America. Since ideologies evolve slowly, coming up with a new word every year would be stupid. Hence, we have a gradual process of the words changing their meanings slowly because it cannot be otherwise, leaving people like me annoyed and forced to cope.
What about the applicability of the term, "neoliberalism," outside the US? I'm still going to call bullshit. Modern economic theories and doctrines don't trace their roots to the theorists described by the etymology of the term. Whether you are talking about trade, the relationship between economic growth and regulation, taxation and incentives or anything like that, this is really about the debate between Keynesianism, monetarism, and a bunch of other economic models that are based on mathematical principles that are separate from any debates on the concept of liberty, however we define it. That latter thing is a purely normative issue. The debates over the effects of economic policy are based on mathematical models, and while individuals have their interpretations of those models influenced by their normative beliefs, that is a flaw in cognition, not a statement of the models themselves. In other words: "neoliberalism" is still bad terminology. European deregulation may be less rooted in Burke than American deregulation, but we don't call American conservatism, "Burkeanism." And in fact, we shouldn't. I wrote a series of posts a while back bemoaning how far conservatism has come from Burke, and the damage done to the American political system by the fact that we have nothing now that actually resembles classical conservatism given the dysfunction in the modern conservative movement, which has just gone off the rails. I'd take Burke over Trump any day of the week. Burke was smart.
You want a term for the ideology? One that crosses national boundaries without any confusion over history or anything? One that doesn't mix up economic and social issues? Try this: economic deregulation. Just don't say "neoliberalism." It's a stupid term. It's ahistorical, non-descriptive, and intrinsically prone to confusion across national boundaries. Add to that a set of scholars who preen about their worldliness by refusing to read anything about American politics that would allow them to recognize that the word, "liberal," has a distinctive meaning in the country with the biggest economy on the planet, and... [facepalm]
Neoliberalism. No more of this word, please. It's a bad word.
Now, let us close with a prayer. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. Amen.
Links to the "classical conservatism" series
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII