Why YSK: I’ve noticed in recent years more people using “neoliberal” to mean “Democrat/Labor/Social Democrat politicians I don’t like”. This confusion arises from the different meanings “liberal” has in American politics and further muddies the waters.
Neoliberalism came to the fore during the 80’s under Reagan and Thatcher and have continued mostly uninterrupted since. Clinton, both Bushs, Obama, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Johnson, and many other world leaders and national parties support neoliberal policies, despite their nominal opposition to one another at the ballot box.
It is important that people understand how neoliberalism has reshaped the world economy in the past four decades, especially people who are too young to remember what things were like before. Deregulation and privatization were touted as cost-saving measures, but the practical effect for most people is that many aspects of our lives are now run by corporations who (by law!) put profits above all else. Neoliberalism has hollowed out national economies by allowing the offshoring of general labor jobs from developed countries.
In the 80’s and 90’s there was an “anti-globalization” movement of the left that sought to oppose these changes. The consequences they warned of have come to pass. Sadly, most organized opposition to neoliberal policies these days comes from the right. Both Trump and the Brexit campaign were premised on reinvigorating national economies. Naturally, both failed, in part because they had no cohesive plan or understanding that they were going against 40 years of precedent.
So, yes, establishment Democrats are neoliberals, but so are most Republicans.
The thing to get about deregulation in this context is that it’s a misleading term- ‘deregulation’ doesn’t mean un-doing regulation, it means handing regulatory authority over from democratically-accountable regulators, to private regulators that are less-accountable and often have interests at odds with those of the public.
In feudal times, regulation of trade or business was left to trade associations or guilds (who got to write their own rules that were typically rubber-stamped by the local nobility’s younger son) and that system more or less translated into today’s modern republics, up until the guilds and trade associations became trusts and monopolies. When the democratic regulatory state emerged to regulate spheres of business like banking and polluting industry because private regulators shat the bed, that was a shot in a war that the old guard business elites haven’t stopped fighting- they saw this as a taking of their power, and have sustained decades of effort to hand public authority back over to private trade associations
Seems to me this argument rests on the assumption of private regulators being less accountable public regulators but i don’t think this plays out so clear cut in practice. When’s the last time you ever had a problem with FINTRAC or the New York Stock exchange for instance?
The point I wanted to make here is that it matters who has regulatory control in a given sphere, and often private regulators’ interests and considerations will not be the same as those of the public at large. The democratic regulatory state exists (such as it is any more) because prior regimes of private regulation simply did not consider the public interest adequately. There is such a thing today as the EPA because congress in 1970 decided acid rain and rivers on fire wasn’t cool, and all of those ‘self-regulating’ industries out there just weren’t considering their downwind/downstream air-breathing, water-drinking neighbors enough. Likewise, regulatory controls on banking were imposed under the New Deal. The notion of public regulators is, historically speaking, a relatively recent one, and the ongoing political fighting about whether they ought to be public or private really ought to get the attention it deserves instead of being buried under abstract ‘government bad’ rhetoric.