what on earth do people think neoliberalism means suddenly? it means free trade but out of nowhere I see zoomers treating it like it's some kind of bogeyman?
I wonder if they confused neoliberal with liberal? Similar words, very different meaning. Either way, wishing for even less echo chambers in the media is not constructive or beneficial for society.
It means more than just free trade though. It's free trade on every level of society, not just between countries. Ironically, it's the exact category of logical error that Adam Smith points out in Mercantilism in "The Wealth Of Nations", except it's done in reverse. Neoliberalism is essentially the (mis)application of macroeconomic logic to microeconomics, which leads to the conclusion that the market optimizes for the public good, a conclusion which is held as an article of faith among neoliberals.
Their almost religious fervor gave them a lot of impetus for a while, but as examples of neoliberal policy failing to live up to the promise have been piling up in the last 30 years, their currency of "dude, trust me" has faced significant devaluation.
It's lead to the dismantlement and privatization of of social institutions to the clear detriment of everyone who isn't a shareholder in the privately owned replacements. The American prison system is perhaps the best example of this going awry.
That definition of neoliberalism falls a bit short, don't you think? Core concepts of neoliberalism are:
1. Deregulation
2. Free global trade
3. Financial globalization
4. Some varying kinds of austerity politics by governments
5. Privatization of public goods
Take alone those five points and scan through the western history of the past 30 years and tell me the aforementioned concepts are not the cause of most of our current crises.
I'm not even an anticapitalist, in fact I believe most people who claim to be anticapitalist are actually anti-neoliberals.
Good definition, but then you see people like Trump being called "Neoliberal" when he definitely didn't allow free trade and, in fact, implemented tariffs.
Trump's "America First" economic policy was the opposite of Neoliberalism.
You also get Democrats who signed on to stimulus packages (again, opposite of Neoliberal austerity) being called "Neoliberal" by their detractors.
Those were the spearheads, I would say. Trump represented more the "nationalism-but-profiting-from-globalizationism" type to me. There was certainly more protectionism in his policies than neoliberalism (originally) intended.
Politicians like Trump, Johnson and others to me are a symptom of the problems neoliberalism caused. If you de-industrialize your country and outsource workers class jobs to low-wage countries then you seed a majority of pissed off workers.
Calling Trump neoliberal is blatantly wrong from my pov. He's mainly a nationalist who is able to assemble the angry people (that have good reason to be angry) behind him and initiates culture wars.
All that is just driven by opportunistic politicians and megacorps who willingly bite the hand that feeds 'em: Without a halfway functional society there's no good business long term.
It is indeed a very vaguely defined term! But i don't think it has ever meant free trade. Free trade is key plank of classical liberalism. But neoliberalism is about replacing state or community action with markets in the domestic sphere - privatization, deregulation, reframing users of services like education and public transport as customers rather than students or passengers, generally "giving people choices" rather than taking responsibility for providing services.
