- Neoliberals were more right than wrong and their biggest problem is that they're subject to many of the truths they themselves emphasized.
To summarize a very long story: free trade and "just let people do things" are excellent first principles in a world where lots of nasty tradeoffs have to be made, markets are efficient on the whole, but in a way that gets more annoying the more intelligent you are, hence why smart people are usually anti-market. deregulation is good, much better than tax cuts, but people who're already rich in the current overregulated world can lobby for tax cuts and against deregulation, so "actually existing neoliberalism" is mostly an ideology about cutting taxes rather than deregulation or even (real) privatization.
(e.g. most Thatcher privatizations did not put firms into the market to compete properly, but into specially created LARP markets created and controlled by the state.)
Neoliberalism can join social democracy and "AES" amongst the ranks of ideas betrayed most by their own chief practitioners. Now that "actually existing neoliberalism" is on its deathbed and we're heading into a much worse world (a warmongering, anti-trade, don't let people do things sort of world, a world with all the downsides of postwar social democracy and none of the upsides…), more people should recognize this fact.
Unfortunately that won't happen because:
- Politics today is mostly downstream of personality.
Leftists will not accept these points because they have implications that run contrary to the generally leftist personality. Open-minded neurotics do not want to be told that the chaos machine cannot be beaten by a smart person applying their faculties creatively. Worse still, neoliberals themselves cannot take on this insight because for them, too, it's not about the reality of the situation but about their personality traits. They have a disagreeable streak, a love of saying "selfishness is good, actually" to shock the kind-hearted. That's why they love Thatcher, someone who should be hated by neoliberals with a thousand times the fury that she's hated by communism: because she was a very disagreeable person who spoke free market platitudes even as she ducked every opportunity she could find to actually set the market loose.
This is the number one reason why attempts to pander to members of the global Trump cul
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