Writing About Neoliberalism: Some Thoughts

Some years ago certain members of the commentariat began attacking the meaningfulness of the word "neoliberal" as a descriptor of economic policy, insisting it was an empty epithet. Initially seeming to me a very strange claim given that its use had long been established by that point it quickly became apparent that this was really an attack against those who criticized the economic policies of figures like Hillary Clinton or Britain's Blairites and preferred to them those of a Bernie Sanders, or a Jeremy Corbyn --a piece of bad faith hippie-punching by centrist political hacks who would likely never have dared attempt such against opponents who had a mainstream platform from which to fight back. Like Jonathan Chait. And Washington Monthly (of course) politics editor Bill Scher. And Nick Cohen (given space for the last in the Guardian, a reminder of where that paper really stands).

Still, considering the rancor it did seem to me that if they were false charges made in bad faith by political hacks users of the term were not invulnerable to it because of how theorists of the concept had explicated it in the past. Certainly such figures as a David Harvey, one of the principal popularizers of the concept, had provided a good deal of insight, not least in his important book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, reading which one understands that this was a particular program rooted in certain ideas and offering particular prescriptions (market fundamentalism, commending to the public deregulation and privatization, etc.) that, picked up and advanced as part of a right-wing political counter-offensive, changed economic life all over the world in significant ways, and in the process changed much else as well (not least in bringing about the postmodern "cultural condition" to which he had previously devoted a book). All the same, if getting much right there is much else that the conventional, short, explanation of the matter does not capture (many of those who explain neoliberalism miss or fail to properly stress the financialization that is fundamental to it, or to acknowledge, let alone reconcile, the libertarian and anti-statist theory and rhetoric with the reality of the massive state role in the model, e.g. less welfare for humans but more for corporations)--imperfections of which the centrists denying the concept's usefulness made the most. As this suggested broadly comprehensive explication of the concept and its various dimensions in a way that could really and truly be treated as a touchstone for those discussing the subject was scarce, in part because much of the work that would have enabled this seemed to have gone undone. Academics approaching the records of particular governments, or the functioning of economies, tended to write a lot about a very little, rather than vice-versa, in that way reflective of academic life encouraging and rewarding not those who deal with the basics on which everything else rests (like clear, strong and illuminating definitions), but those who do not worry overmuch about such matters as they set about specializing minutely, the more in as the appearance of rigor all too often counts for more than the reality. This is reflective, too, of how due to those same priorities, even after the specialists may have done very good work, few much concern themselves with "what it all means," as we can only hope to understand when someone bothers to try to produce a useful big picture from it--all as, I suspect, academics, perhaps not unnaturally for people who set store by ideas, tended to overrate the significance of these as against hard facts of power and material results in telling the story (looking too much at the musings of would-be philosophes, of whom they too often tend to be in awe, and too little at what the money men hoped to get).

To be entirely fair I do not know that the relevant scholars did a worse job with neoliberalism than they did anything else (these are, again, failures pervading the whole world of scholarship today), but these failures mattered the more precisely because the commentariat has been so hostile to their findings (such that, for example, those who criticized neoliberalism as neoliberalism had to defend their reasoning much more carefully than, for example, the Anti-Communist bashing that model). That encouraged me to try to work things out for myself--searching after a definition and description that would better account for just how contradiction-riddled (frankly, dishonest) the neoliberal Agenda was, and how the result did not go according to plan, but still represented a meaningful departure from what came before that could meaningfully be identified as neoliberalism. This extended to my examining the record of many "neoliberal" politicians in a comprehensive way (specifically Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) to see whether their records did indeed correspond to the neoliberal line. It also extended to developing a conception of how the neoliberal model works in some detail and how neoliberalism was distinguishable not just from what I called "Keynesian Fordism,", but at the same time also from mere classical liberalism, or financialization for that matter; and empirically testing that model against the available statistical data using such metrics as investment, assets, trade, profits, central government-to-GDP ratios and much else to develop a picture of how policymakers and investors and the forces they unleashed restructured the U.S. economy in particular during the neoliberal era. It extended, too, to my using this understanding of neoliberalism to examine particular facets of the matter, like what neoliberalism has meant for the expectations and reality of technological innovation, and even the ways in which working people are living their lives (or finding themselves unable to do so).

To make a long story short I concluded that, yes, neoliberalism, complex as it may be, is indeed a sound, strong, useful concept for describing the economic thinking, policymaking, economic history of the last half century; that one can justly refer to the governments of the United States and Britain of this period as having been neoliberal governments, whose policies produced a distinct economic model, with great, varied, ubiquitous consequence extending into the cultural sphere. I don't know that I convinced anyone else of all this, but then I don't know that that was a realistic prospect. Again, those in the mainstream who put down the concept were doing so in bad faith, all as those who did find the concept useful didn't need convincing, as at any rate all this was probably a bit over the heads of the public, which online rarely looks at such things as working papers of any kind, let alone about such subjects as these. Still, even after many years of researching, thinking, revising as I researched and thought again I stand by the body of work I produced, and the position to which it led me, which is infinitely more than can be said for the brass check earners who fill up the opinion pages in the newspapers, magazines, wire services, news channels and web sites that command a totally unwarranted respect from people of conventional mind--all as it seems to me that a real understanding of neoliberalism is growing only more important as we try to make sense of where the world is headed now.