Really recommend the book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era” by Gary Gerstle if you want to know more about what neoliberalism is and what the goals are/were and why it’s actively destroying the country.
The neoliberal order was no exception. Despite being a project incubated in Republican circles and launched under Ronald Reagan, its full-scale consolidation occurred under the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
Imo the neoliberal order was a response to the Civil Rights Era, a WORLDWIDE movement that gave ordinary citizens more rights and power than any other time in history. To disempower them, capitalism was weaponized to create neoliberal policies to make poor people stay poor, without capital, and thus powerless.
But it was not until Reagan that neoliberalism actively shaped the policy agenda of the federal government. Deregulation became the mantra of the decade, its most visible manifestation being the assault on collective bargaining and the further weakening of already struggling unions. Progressive taxation was contested ideologically and dismantled politically: When Reagan was elected, the income tax system was structured in 15 different brackets, with the highest reaching 70 percent; after his presidency, the country was left with just two brackets, 15 and 28 percent.
“Neoliberals,” Gerstle writes, “had long argued for the need to ringfence free markets, limiting participation to those who could handle its rigors.” Now they also embraced a religiously imbued neo-Victorian moral code, setting themselves in opposition to the permissiveness and moral relativism of the 1960s and 1970s. The race-biased mass incarceration of an “underclass” — regarded as unfit to handle those rigors — seemed to offer the ultimate solution. Liberation and repression, freedom and order, were not incompatible; in the neoliberal equation they were strictly interdependent.
So sure, I personally dislike neoliberalism, but I have a good understanding of what it is as well, so you’re criticism is invalid.
You are making a lot of assumptions about my knowledge (or lack thereof) on the subject as well as a sizeable one about your depth of knowledge on it.
