A Conceptual Trash Heap Toni Morrison was wrong when she intoned that language is violence. But let’s give her this: the reckless use of words can do violence, idiomatically speaking, to clear thinking and therefore to political analysis. Slinging about words whose meaning is muddled, misleading, or tendentious — or whose usage is meant to oversimplify or to inflame — makes it impossible to think rationally, coherently, and productively. It is a tall order in this age of slogans and shibboleths to select one word to expunge from our political vocabulary, but if asked to do so I would nominate “neoliberalism.” A coinage of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the term remained fairly limited in its use for two decades, gaining currency at first in academic circles and then exploding in popularity after the financial crash in 2008 and Bernie Sanders’ rise to celebrity. Then, just when it was fading from overexposure, it surged back into fashion. Critics, scholars, consultants, and commentators now finger neoliberalism as the reason for practically all our political problems, especially the Democrats’ failure to keep the presidency out of the hands of Donald Trump. “What Trump is attacking is neoliberalism. Economic neoliberalism underpins the past seventy years of Western economic and cultural order,” declares America’s most overrated senator, Chris Murphy, who alleges that neoliberalism has bequeathed a “very real epidemic of American unhappiness.” (Struggling with his cognitive dissonance over a concept he doesn’t quite understand, Murphy added: “Though it contains the word liberal, neoliberalism was devised by libertarian-conservative economists.”) Ro Khanna, another ambitious, out-of-his-depth operator, calls for “the rejection of neoliberalism. For forty years, we made a mistake. Frankly, it was both parties.” (Forty? Wasn’t it seventy? But what are a few decades among friends?) The Hewlett Foundation, which bankrolls efforts to replace neoliberalism with something else — the left hates billionaires except when they fund the left — defines neoliberalism as “free-market fundamentalism” and “the free-market, anti-government, growth-at-all-costs approach to economic and social policy.” Search the horizonless steppes of the internet and you will find countless pundits, politicians, and even ostensibly knowledgeable policymakers invoking the bogeyman of neoliberalism to explain where the Democrats and America went wrong. The promiscuous use of the word “neoliberalism” has plagued our discourse since well before Trump. Over the years several intrepid explicators have pointed up its semiotic bankruptcy. Back in 2009, in an academic article titled, “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan,” the political scientists Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse concluded that “neoliberalism has become a conceptual trash heap capable of accommodating multiple distasteful phenomena without much argument as to whether one or the other component really belongs.” A decade later, the fine intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers warned that “the success of ‘neoliberalism’ is a measure of its substantive hollowness” and noted “four distinctly different phenomena” that fly under its banner: an economic theory; a set of economic policies; the capitalist economy itself; and — take a breath — “the hegemonic force of the culture that surrounds and entraps us.” The journalist Jonathan Chait meanwhile traced how “neoliberal” morphed into an off-the-shelf slur used to denigrate regular Democrats. “The ubiquitous epithet is intended to separate its target — liberals — from the values they claim to espouse,” he shrewdly observed. “By relabeling self-identified liberals as ‘neoliberals,’ their critics on the left accuse them of betraying the historic liberal cause.” In his Substack newsletter, Matthew Yglesias continues valiantly to puncture what he calls “anti-neoliberal” thinking. Yet for all these debunkings, the term has only gotten more popular, leaping out of academic tracts and leftist polemics and into the vernacular. As it is used today, “neoliberalism” contains at least three assumptions that its users hope to promulgate but which are, in fact, wrong. The first concerns what historians call periodization: reliance on neoliberalism as a historical framework depends on the flawed premise that in or about 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the American ethos changed. Second, the invocation of neoliberalism incorporates a critique of liberals and Democrats, who, it is insinuated, supinely acquiesced in Reaganism, creating a “Washington consensus” by jettisoning the party’s historic commitment to using government to better people’s lives. Third, the neoliberal mantra implies that the economic policies pursued by Democrats when they had power were an economic, political, and even moral failure. Each of these ideas may contain kernels of truth. But none holds up as an overarching and empirically demonstrable proposition. If we want to understand liberalism and liberal governance over the last half century — and there is no denying that it is now facing a crisis — we should start by euthanizing this unenlightening word. The sooner we clarify our thinking about our recent economic and political history, the more intelligently we can debate what should come next. The Origins of Neoliberalism To understand where “neoliberalism” came from, we must return to the 1970s, when American voters were repudiating liberalism — known ominously in those days as “the L word” — in droves. By the late 1970s, the enormous achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had become clear — but it was no less clear that they had failed to stanch the spread of social maladies such as divorce, out-of-wedlock births, drug use, and violent crime. The civil rights movement had secured formal equality for black Americans and invigorated efforts to do likewise for women, gays, and other groups, but liberals suffered when they counseled more intrusive governmental measures to guarantee not only political and legal equality but also economic and social equality. Keynesian policies that had fueled prosperity since World War II proved powerless to combat the beast of stagflation, and the rise of a post-industrial economy — which had shifted away from heavy manufacturing and toward white-collar jobs that demanded a college education for the new hordes of “symbolic analysts” — triggered a long series of painful geographic and professional dislocations. In foreign policy, the Vietnam War stained the luster of liberal internationalism, leaving many Americans
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