The dominant use of the term “neoliberal” is to try to make poorly thought out or fundamentally dishonest attacks on Democrats from the left seem intellectually serious. If you wanted to use the term in a sensible way it would mean something like: policies favoring low barriers to trade and finance, privatization, punitive social welfare policies, and harsh enforcement of property rights for the wealthy combined with suppression of property rights for indigenous people/poor people,all with some sort of supply side justification. In other words, it’s the basic policy of the Republican Party in the USA.
A quick look at the policies pushed by President Obama or advocated by Hillary Clinton or expressed in the Democratic Party platform would show that Democrats have very different ideas, in general. For example, HRC's proposals for free community college, expansion of Obamacare, massive public investment in infrastructure and education, and protection for voting rights all reveal priorities that do not fit this definition of “neoliberal”. Even the famous “Washington Consensus” that the theorists of anti-neoliberalism always cite does not fit this definition. The Wikipedia page is enough to show that things are more complex than often claimed. In the Wikipedia list of the 10 points of the Washington Consensus we find things like:
Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;
But wait: aren’t neoliberals supposed to to be market fundamentalists who oppose social services? If you look at the original Washington Consensus paper by John Williamson there are all sorts of passages like this:
Policy reform with regard to public expenditure is thus perceived to consist of switching expenditure from subsidies toward education and health (especially to benefit the disadvantaged) and infrastructure investment. I would add that, for my taste, the hostility toward subsidies tends to be too general. I fully sympathize with the hostility toward indiscriminate subsidies, but I also believe that there are circumstances in which carefully targeted subsidies can be a useful instrument. Thus, my own test of a country's policies would not be whether it had abolished all subsidies, but whether it could provide a convincing explicit justification for those that remain in terms of improving either resource allocation or income distribution.
If this is neoliberalism, than neoliberalism is concerned with reducing income inequality — in other words, “neoliberalism” doesn’t mean anything at all. Williamson also has interesting remarks on capital movement:
As noted above, liberalization of foreign financial flows is not regarded as a high priority. In contrast, a restrictive attitude limiting the entry of foreign direct investment (FDI) is regarded as foolish. Such investment can bring needed capital, skills, and know-how, either producing goods needed for the domestic market3 or contributing new exports. The main motivation for restricting FDI is economic nationalism, which Washington disapproves of, at least when practiced by countries other than the United States.
Well, that’s fascinating — not only does he say liberalization of foreign financial flows is not a high priority, but he points out that US policy is hypocritical.
So the sensible definition of neoliberalism doesn’t fit the Democrats or even the Washington Consensus. Democrats have a mix of policy proposals (and govern in terms of a mix of policies) which may include things that are wrong or even horrible, but they are clearly not market fundamentalists bent on imposing some Hayekian dystopia on the working class. How do our anti-neoliberal theorists square the circle and denounce Democrats for neoliberalism? They use a variety of rhetorical methods that include:
- ignoring actual Democratic policies in favor of imaginary ones,
- bogus nostalgia for the good old days (the Cold War and Jim Crow America was no paradise),
- racist/sexist assumptions (“working class” and “white male working class” are equivalent only if you subscribe to racist and sexist ideas about who matters)
- and, most often, a bizarre sleight of hand in which “neoliberal” comes to mean any divergence from a strict and antique anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist, ideology that doesn’t have any popular support or even much coherence. Despite the ravings of the right wing, the Democratic Party is in favor of markets, and (broadly speaking) capitalism. Democrats are and always have been nationalistic and not pacifist (FDR was no utopian socialist). The Democrats are essentially a social democratic party with a strong influence over the last decades from the civil rights movement.. Many anti-neoliberal attacks on the Democrats, however, attack the Democrats for diverging from the far right cartoon vision of Democrats. For example, opposing open borders is apparently “neoliberal” as is supporting market based solutions to health insurance. More irritating, the Democratic Party prioritization of civil rights over fundamentalist socialism is often treated as heinous neoliberalism — all that identity politics (known as civil rights to Democrats) is apparently very very bad according to the Anti-Neoliberal ideological scolds.
The Democratic party is an untidy coalition. Many of the policies proposed by by party politicians are not ones I support. For example, the US State Department’s winking at a right wing coup in Honduras under Hillary Clinton was inhumane and stupid. The Department of Justice efforts to support civil rights are way too cautious and weak for me. And people like Jay Nixon are grotesque in many ways. But none of that is “neoliberal” in any sensible use of the word. Basically, the term neoliberal has been robbed of any meaning other than “left wing ideologists disapprove”, and their disapproval means little.