The Neoliberal Tribe: An Epistle

A big happy friendly tent, with optimism and memes

Tama is the real neoliberal in the family.

On Saturday night I got a message from a friend, who saw me tweeting excitedly about the Neoliberal Shill Bracket on Twitter (one of the best things on Twitter in ages btw, vote now). The message went something like:

…seeing as you seem to identify yourself as neoliberal I kinda want to ask you about that, as my experience with “neoliberalism” is that it’s a concept mainly used by non-liberals to explain the rise of populism or just really smear anyone who’s not socialist or conservative. People who I listen to who are often, sort of, labeled as neoliberals prefer to call themselves “classical liberals”, and make fun of the term “neoliberalism” in general. Granted, these are Swedes in a Swedish context, so this might not be a global phenomenon, but what do you see to be the difference between neoliberalism and classical liberalism?

I thought I’d post the response because it’s something I’ve wanted to write about for a while, but I never had the chance or the excuse to collect my thoughts about sufficiently to do so. And it turned out to be much too long of a written thing not to post it. Here’s a lightly-edited version of my response below.

NB: I self-identify as a Lizard Person first, Trini second, neoliberal-adjacent third (if at all).

Stuff about neoliberalism

1. I think “neoliberalism” is actually more of a very loose coalition of somewhat like-minded people rather than a coherent ideology or a defined system of policy prescriptions. Another way of saying this: I think “neoliberal” as a way of describing a person exists and has a meaning, however vague. “Neoliberalism” as a body of thought which stands distinctly apart from the mix of ideas that influenced it, doesn’t really exist IMO.
2. “…my experience with "neoliberalism" is that it’s a concept mainly used by non-liberals to explain the rise of populism or just really smear anyone who’s not socialist or conservative” - Yes I’d go along with that!
3. Following from that, AFAIK Neoliberal Twitter came about as a way of “reclaiming” the word since previously it was only used by people to refer to a thing in a negative way. Many neoliberals are probably closest to being issue-by-issue centrists (though there are quite a few libertarians around too) but not all (not many?) centrists I think would identify as neoliberal.
4. Like, the main unifying intellectual theme of neoliberalism might be “capitalism and free trade are, like, really good, especially for pulling poor countries out of poverty, but governments/institutions are also important beyond just setting the rules of the game!” which is… a pretty big and messy tent!
5. It used to be just what Americans called “liberal” — yes, DLC/Clintonite/right-of-the-Democratic-party, but still liberal — in the glorious ‘90s but in America nobody wants to be called a liberal anymore since Fox News came about, so the people to the left of neoliberal rebranded as “progressives” around 2004 onwards and eventually decided post-2008 that they wanted to be socialists instead because that sounded like fun. The remaining people who thought “hang on, Clinton and non-Iraq Blair had some good ideas y’all, and Moderate Obama is pretty good!” were cast aside as neoliberal sellouts and orphaned politically by the populist wing of the Democratic party and their equivalents in their respective countries.
6. Some of the more woke US libertarians are kinda part of the thing, too, because they have also been politically orphaned by the right. There was an attempt to make little movements called things like “bleeding heart libertarians”, “liberaltarians” but those names are really utterly terrible so I guess they just jumped into the big tent. That was a good choice IMO, and everyone’s better off for it.
7. I actually think Neoliberal Twitter is unified way more by outlook and temperament than by policy views. It’s a group of mostly pretty optimistic, contrarian, globalist types, many of whom like economics, are at least mildly technocratic/nerdy, and have great fondness for the ‘90s, with a healthy sense of irony and humour. I really, really vibe with that. And the memes are good.
8. I cannot overstate how much the positivity/humour side of point 7 has improved my Twitter experience this year - I mean, I’m very much at the fringes of the neoliberal thing but I find it nice and insulated from a lot of the negativity and anger that people seem to gravitate towards on Twitter. And because there’s a reasonably wide variety of opinions in the camp, I don’t feel like I’m in an echo-chamber of everyone saying the same thing.

Speculative: neoliberalism vs. classical liberalism

1. So, to your actual question: there is a split in terminology between American and European notions of liberalism - that’s mainly because in 20th century American politics, “liberalism” came to be associated with the New Deal, the welfare state and, in political theory, with the social justice/redistributive ideas of people like John Rawls. In Europe, (classical) liberalism was always (and still is, AFAIK) about freedom, rights and an attachment to markets, and never had this association with things like the welfare state, which evolved in different ways there.
2. And, FINALLY, an answer to your actual question! I’d say classical liberalism is structurally the inverse of neoliberalism - it is a very philosophically rich tradition (I guess it’s expected when a thing is described as “classical”) but, there generally aren’t that many people who call themselves primarily “classical liberals” - most people with that worldview might describe themselves as libertarians, conservatives etc. I mean, there’s still not many of those either, but comparatively speaking. And a significant fraction of self-identified neoliberals are pretty likely to have read and been influenced by classical liberal heroes (Hayek, Mises, Friedman).
3. The “classical liberals making fun of ‘neoliberalism’” thing might be just that neoliberalism isn’t a real philosophical stance (see point 1), and so - being classical liberals who care about philosophical stances - they see it as frivolous. That is just conjecture because I don’t know anything about Swedish political debates.

So that’s it for now, I think. I have other thoughts, about how self-identifying neoliberals are useless as a political movement because it’s basically just a bunch of socially-inept nerds (and, as a socially-inept nerd, I like it like that!), and how Neoliberal Twitter is a bit too white and sexless and needs more Gucci Mane in its life. But I’ll leave that for another time.