This post is part of our series defining words. Defining words might seem trivial, but one of the most effective strategies authoritarians employ is redefining what specific words mean. The most famous example of this might be when the Nazis tried to redefine socialism. At the time, socialism was extremely popular, but just like today, most people weren’t paying enough attention to really understand it. That made it easy for the Nazis to add the word “national” to create “national socialism” which sounds like a kind of socialism even though it is exactly the opposite. The confusion they created didn’t just help the Nazis of the 1930’s — it continues to help authoritarians today.
The words “liberal” and “neoliberal” are being redefined in the same way today. If you talk to a self-described conservative, they’ll tell you that “liberal” is a synonym for “socialist” which is a synonym for “communist” (not true). And if you ask them to define “neoliberal”, they’ll tell you it’s the same as a liberal but even more “communist”. Again, that’s not what it means.
Liberal
The ideas we call liberalism today started out in England in the late 1600’s. They still had a king at that time, and though most people didn’t want to get rid of the monarchy, they did want normal people to have some rights, so they created a constitution that limited the power of the king, declared that the elected government was a higher authority than the king, and created a bill of rights. They still had a monarchy, which is a form of authoritarianism, and the elected government wasn’t very democratic at all, but this was a huge step up.
So that’s how liberalism started: Just the people deciding that normal individuals should have some rights. Liberalism has some inherent flaws. For one thing, it easily coexists with authoritarianism – the idea is that if the people have a list of rights, actual power can remain within a single class of people instead of being shared by all. In addition, it only sees government as a source of tyranny and doesn’t recognize the fact that there are other types of power that can by tyrannical.
Since its invention, conservatives have been opposed to liberalism because they like the traditional form of society. When you give people the option to do whatever they want, a significant number of them will not behave the way tradition would like. Conservatives actually liked the monarchy – they really believed the rule of the king was ordained by God and they were terribly offended that the law would shift power away from God. Modern British conservatives still like the monarchy, which is why British taxpayers spent $86 million on supporting the royal family in the previous fiscal year, even though the British royal family is worth around $88 billion.
This tension between individual rights and tradition exists in the US as well, with liberals asking for individuals to have unlimited rights to self-expression and religious belief, and attempting to establish truly equal treatment under the law, while conservatives only want the freedom to express traditional ideas and practice their traditional religions, and support different levels of protection for different classes of Americans (for example, complete legal protection for police officers, and absolutely no protection for anyone they say is not a citizen, which includes people who were not born here, but sometimes includes people who are trans, Black, Jewish or even Native American).
Neoliberalism: Where liberalism went wrong
If you take the long view of history, every major social change involves one class of people taking power from the previous ruling class. In the early “slave era” there were enslaved people and lords, with no justification for slavery but violence. Next, came the feudal period; slavery had not worked out because the enslaved people rebelled, so a new class of people added a religious justification to get working people to go along with their own exploitation. Liberalism was the idea that helped people move from feudalism to the next order: capitalism. It did so by adding another justification: That only a government can be tyrannical. Based on this logic, an individual who is not part of the government cannot by a tyrant even if they literally own everything.
Capitalists identified this workaround early on, and they were able to steer the liberal movement away from freedom for everyone and instead toward increasing their own power. In place of the ineffable plan of God, they used the Invisible Hand of the Market as their justification for abusing working people. They grabbed as much power as they could, but comforted working people by pointing to the Bill of Rights and various contractual agreements as indicators that working people have rights. Again, liberalism can coexist with authoritarianism of all kinds if it has a laundry list of rights to make things seem OK; democracy is not required. In fact, liberalism tends to laugh at the idea of democracy, saying true democracy is an unattainable utopian dream, so it is best not to even try to create it. We are supposed to be content with a list of protections instead of holding true power — even though the power to grant us those protections lies with the same people who would abuse us.
Liberals try to take credit for the great advances toward democracy that took place in the industrial age, but if you look a little closer, liberals are not usually the vanguard of those movements. Instead, “dangerous leftists” are the ones leading the charge toward democratizing power.
Neoliberalism elevates the ideology of market capitalism to the status of a religion that makes capitalists the avatars of God. With the market being the will of God, everything it does is justified, no matter how horrific or insane. If the government sells all the water in my area to capitalists, and the capitalists take all that water to make a product that I can’t afford, and I and everyone I know dies of dehydration, that isn’t a crime against humanity – rather, it is a sad but ultimately good outcome of following the will of God. This may seem absurd, but “water privatization” is a real problem all over the world, including in the US.
Neoliberalism tries to turn everything into a problem to be solved by the market – not just business, but government, education, and every other aspect of human behavior. Even our sexuality is frequently subjected to an economic analysis. If you’re sitting there thinking, “Well, yes, everything should be subjected to an economic analysis – economics is a science and science is good,” then your mind has been colonized by this meme. There’s a lot I could say about it, but in the interest of time, I’ll just say that ethical behavior is not usually the most economically advantageous behavior, and if your economics assume ethical behavior without teaching ethical behavior, what you will get is evil that’s been justified by math.
Neoliberalism believes that the market is the will of God, but to follow the will of God, the people participating in the market need data. Without data, the actions of the market are chaotic; with perfect data, the market perfectly reflects the will of God (or so neoliberals believe). Therefore, neoliberals are obsessed with counting beans. Some jobs have become so beholden to bean counters that most of the job is creating bean reports. Once the beans have been counted and analyzed, then workers receive important guidelines from the supervisors on how to be more “efficient” which doesn’t mean efficient, but rather means maximizing the number of dollars in the pocket of the capitalist. Again, if you’re thinking, “But maximizing dollars is the same as efficiency,” then your mind has been colonized by this meme. There are serious limits to the ability of money to accurately reflect value, because the only thing money can really reflect is the values of human beings with their limited knowledge and inherent fallibility; moreover, markets reflect the values of wealthy people far more than people who don’t have much money.
There is a relationship between identity politics and neoliberalism, it just isn’t quite what conservatives claim. As I’ve said, neoliberalism claims that we can achieve a perfectly rational market that adheres to the will of God, and as such is completely morally good. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and the myriad of other discriminatory behavior that is traditional in our society are all irrational and therefore are usually considered to be an affront to the market. Neoliberalism frowns upon them because they are irrational – not because they hurt people. It is just as likely to actively ignore human prejudices as it is to try to do something about them. One example would be the fact that women in the US are paid about 82 cents for every dollar men are paid. We can try to fix this somehow or we can justify it by saying that women choose to stay home with their children, thus (irrationally) opting out of the market.
As a neoliberal institution, the Democratic party’s solution to the wage gap has been to promote affordable childcare, which brings up another of neoliberalism’s characteristics: It tries to make all workers functionally the same; it claims that with training and gumption, any worker can perform any job. We are each a generic cog that can be adapted to any machine. This thinking reduces the role of a mother to the producer of new labor, denying the emotional relationship between them and their child. It also denies the emotional relationship between a father and their child, but that happened much earlier on, so we don’t even think much about it today. We can imagine other solutions, like the state paying parents to perform the important job of parenting, but those are not neoliberal solutions because they reduce the flow of cash into the capitalists’ pockets — and when profits are reduced, that’s called “inefficiency”.
Racists can (and do) use neoliberalism and its focus on economic logic to reinforce racist institutions. For example, they may say that the police aren’t harassing people in a poor, predominantly Black neighborhood because police are only going there because that’s where the crime is – so in the economic analysis, crime is the demand which the system supplies with police violence. Therefore, the institution of policing is not racist. But the truth is that if the police spend all their time in a given neighborhood, they’ll inevitably find more crime there than they find in places where they aren’t looking. That’s not all – the police are only able to see particular kinds of crime that are both relatively trivial and more common among people who are poor. The truly horrific crimes require money and power to execute, and it is so difficult for police to do anything about those crimes, that they don’t even try.
In conclusion:
Liberalism is the idea that normal people should have a list of rights and freedoms, but not direct control of power. Liberals demand rights; they do not demand power.
Neoliberalism is the ideology of the superiority of market capitalism, and, by extension, capitalists – an extension of liberalism that justifies capitalists as the ruling class.