Neoliberalism: A Quick Follow-up
My post on neoliberalism is getting a fair amount of attention on social media. Jonathan Chait, whose original tweet prompted the post, responded to it with a series of four tweets:
The four tweets are even odder than the original tweet.
First, Chait claims I confuse two different things: Charles Peters-style neoliberalism and “the Marxist epithet for open capitalist economies.” Well, no, I don’t confuse those things at all. I quite clearly state at the outset of my post that neoliberalism has a great many meanings—one of which is the epithet that leftists hurl against people like Chait—but that there was a moment in American history when a group of political and intellectual actors, under the aegis of Peters, took on the name “neoliberal” for themselves. That’s who I was talking about in my post.
Second, contrary to Chait, Peters did not in fact invent the term “neoliberal” or “neoliberalism” in 1983. The term was coined by a group of mostly conservative free market intellectuals, meeting in Paris in 1938 at the Colloque Walter Lippmann, in order to counter the rise of democratic socialism and welfare-state liberalism in Western Europe and the United States. Eventually, that group would coalesce after World War II as the Mont Pelerin Society, with Friedrich Hayek at the intellectual helm.
Third, the reason that earlier coinage matters, and isn’t just a point of scholarly pedantry, is that while some scholars will challenge what I’m about to say, the program that that original group of neoliberals set out at Mont Pelerin does in fact bear a resemblance to the word “neoliberalism” that often gets bandied around by the left today. Insofar as that was a program to rollback the welfare state and social democracy, to revalorize capital and the capitalist as a moral good, to proclaim the ideological supremacy of the market over the state (the practice is more complicated), “neoliberal” is in fact a useful term to describe a political program that has gained increasing traction around the globe in the last half-century.
It’s important to distinguish neoliberalism in this sense—that is, neoliberalism as a political program—from neoliberalism as a system of political economy. Scholars and activists on the left disagree, fundamentally, about the latter, with some claiming that what we call neoliberalism as a form of political economy is merely capitalism. I’m deliberately side-stepping that debate in order to focus on neoliberalism as a political and ideological program.
(It’s also important to acknowledge that one of the reasons the term “neoliberalism” can be confusing is that outside of the United States, particularly in Europe, liberal has often meant support for free markets and a critique of the welfare state and social democracy. Inside the United States, liberal, at least throughout most of the 20th century, meant support for the welfare state and state intervention in the economy. Get into a discussion about neoliberalism on Twitter, and you inevitably find yourself crashing on a beachhead of this confusion. Personally, I think it’s about as interesting and relevant as that Founding Fathers fanboy who’ll periodically pop up in a discussion thread claiming that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. I merely note it here in order to acknowledge the point and move on.)
Fourth, insofar as Peters and his group of neoliberals in the United States declared the fundamentals of their political program to be: a) opposition to unions; b) opposition to big government (except for the military); and c) support for big business, I find the term “neoliberal” to be useful not only for describing Peters and his crew but also for relating that crew to the overall program of neoliberalism, which I noted in point 3 above, and which today characterizes a good part of the Democratic Party. In other words, while I deliberately did not conflate Peters’s neoliberalism with the leftist epithet for Democrats that Chait objects to, there is in fact a relationship between Peters’s neoliberalism and today’s Democrats (more on this below).
(Incidentally, if you think I was being unfair to Peters-style neoliberalism, I urge you to read this interview Peters gave to Ezra Klein back in 2007, where he reiterates the basics of the program as I outline them here and in my post, and says, forthrightly, “I think in many, many areas, the neoliberals, in effect, won.” That is, they changed liberalism (again, more on this below.) The only plank of the original program that Peters thinks needs to be pursued more forcefully is crushing teachers’ unions and means testing mass entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.)
Fifth, the inspiration for my post, as I said, was a tweet from Chait in which he takes particular delight in professing an impish disbelief in the term “neoliberal,” as if it were a made-up word of paranoid leftists used to abuse liberals like Chait. And in this series of tweets, he doubles down on that disbelief, claiming that Peters-style neoliberalism had at best a shadowy half-life in the magazine world; it “barely existed,” tweets Chait, “then died.” No one’s used the word in ages.
In my post, I claimed that one of the reasons contemporary writers like Chait write from this state of amnesiac euphoria—where they fail to recognize the distance they’ve traveled from the midcentury world of labor liberalism—is that they’ve so completely absorbed the neoliberal critique, almost unconsciously, that they can’t even remember a time when liberals thought otherwise.
It turns out that that wasn’t quite fair. There was a journalist back in 2013 who recognized precisely what I was talking about. Here’s what this writer said about the impact of neoliberal magazines on traditional Democratic Party liberalism (h/t the guy whose Twitter handle is HTML Mencken):
Those magazines once critiqued Democrats from the right, advocating a policy loosely called “neoliberalism,” and now stand in general ideological concord.
Why? I’d say it’s because the neoliberal project succeeded in weaning the Democrats of the wrong turn they took during the 1960s and 1970s. The Democrats under Bill Clinton — and Obama, whose domestic policy is crafted almost entirely by Clinton veterans — has internalized the neoliberal critique.
The name of that writer was Jonathan Chait.
Update (6:30 pm)
I was just re-reading the introduction to The Road from Mont Pelerin, which I link to above (and which I highly recommend), and the authors claim that the first usage of “neoliberal” along the lines of what I mention above was actually by a Swiss economist in 1925 (there was actually a 1898 usage as well, but they claim it was rather different). In the 1930s, neoliberal took off as a term, particularly in France, culminating in that 1938 meeting that I mention above. As the Cornell historian Larry Glickman pointed out to me in a Facebook thread, the term neoliberal was also used by anti-New Dealers in the United States in the 1930s, only their point was to stress that FDR had transformed liberalism from its 19th century understanding (an understanding that was much more sympathetic to markets) into a “neoliberalism” that was too critical of the market and indulgent of the state’s intervention. According to the authors of the introduction to The Road to Mont Pelerin, Frank Knight, a close associate of Milton Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago, wrote an essay criticizing the New Deal in the 1930s along these lines.
Update (9 pm)
Jonathan Chait has a longer response on his Facebook page. It’s kind of a non-response response that I’m posting here merely for the sake of, whatever. More amusing to me is how Damon Linker—think of him as Mark Lilla’s Mini-Me—shows up faithfully in the comments section, like one of the Super Friends in response to a summons from the Bat Signal. Anyway, here’s Chait:
I wrote a tweet a few days ago complaining about the use of “neoliberal” as a term of abuse on the left against liberals. “What if every use of ‘neoliberal’ was replaced with, simply, ‘liberal’? Would any non-propagandistic meaning be lost?,” I wrote. My meaning is that no current group of people defines itself as “neoliberal.” The term is simply used by leftists, usually of the Marxist and/or socialist variety, to denigrate liberals.
Corey Robin has fired back in two posts. None of them, however, answer my question. The first post focuses on a small sect on intellectuals called “neoliberals,” a term that was invented by Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters in the early 1980s. Neoliberalism was not really an ideology (though Peters sort-of tried to flesh it out into it) but a collection of Peters hobbyhorses that mostly revolved around streamlining the functioning of the federal government. Some writers tried to take other aspects of moderate liberalism and call it “neoliberalism.” But the main point is that the label died years ago, and nobody uses it any more as a form of self-identification. Importantly, even though elements of its ideas made their way into the Democratic Party, the label also never attracted any real following in the Democratic mainstream. Bill Clinton, probably the closest thing to an ally neoliberals would have found, called himself a “New Democrat.”
I was never a fan of the “neoliberal” label, for reasons that were persuasively explained to me by Paul Starr when I worked at the American Prospect out of college. Neoliberal writers called their farther-left counterparts “paleoliberals.” As Starr told me, the terms were an attempt to win an argument by using an epithet — “neo” implying that its side had already won the future, and “paleo” implying the other was consigned to the past.
That debate was consigned to a handful of writers (most of them baby boomer men from the Washington Monthly and the New Republic of the 1980s) who passed from the scene or lost interest in it. Modern liberals are all just liberals, though of course we have internal differences. Robin does not refute my point that no current faction uses the label to describe itself. Instead, in his follow-up post, he notes that some right-wingers also used the phrase in the 1930s to oppose the New Deal. To a leftists like Robin, this proves that the ideology is all one and the same. “Insofar as that was a program to rollback the welfare state and social democracy, to revalorize capital and the capitalist as a moral good, to proclaim the ideological supremacy of the market over the state (the practice is more complicated), “neoliberal” is in fact a useful term to describe a political program that has gained increasing traction around the globe in the last half-century,” he writes.
And, yes, if you believe that Charles Peters took his inspiration from the anti-New Deal right, and the modern Democratic Party took its inspiration from Peters, then that is an important connection. But the first connection is preposterous. Peters was a New Dealer who worshipped Roosevelt. He did not see himself as an heir to the 1930s Old Right. Peters was much less a statist than Robin, but clearly belonged on the left half of the political spectrum throughout his career.
Of course, it is convenient for Robin to lump the center-left, with figures like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in with the far right. This was all Robin’s ideological foes, those who stand for somewhat higher taxes and more generous social spending and decarbonization and regulation of finance can be lumped together with the conservatives who wish to roll all those things back.
So obviously Robin and many of his allies will continue to use the term “neoliberal” to describe liberals, because it serves an important propagandistic function for them. But it will continue to be used only by those people to describe current politics, and by nobody else, because it is not a neutral term or a fair-minded attempt to describe the world.