- 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 cult (e.g. "the populist right" + TERFs and other general reactionaries) are doomed. None of their purported grievances are real, none of them care that you can offer a better communist solution. They are in it for motives that are both stupid and malicious, because they have warped personalities rather than because they have real problems. The possibility that they could one day control the state is yet another reason one should mourn that neoliberals did not actually succeed in stripping the state from daily life.
Byy way of worked example: this theory explains why e-atheism broke up into SJWism and anti-SJWism. some people were in it because they were high openness + high agreeableness + high neuroticism. They felt an abstract unease which they explained by the government being run by Christian maniacs in the Bush era, and they didn't like the unfairness of saying all the gays would burn in hell or the ugliness of illegal war. They became SJWs as they realized that the problems went much deeper than Christianity, and now many of them are communists as that underlying neuroticism has been projected onto the economic system as a whole.
Some were in it because they were mid-openness, low agreeableness, and low neuroticism. These people became anti-SJWs because the real reason they were there is that they
enjoyed arguing, they were
debate addicts, what they wanted was to dominate other people in conversation and tediously pick apart the logic of arguments. They're now happy to align with right-wing Christians to own the libs.
And, because it's always good to be reflexive: I have had these insights because I have a contrarian streak, not enough of a contrarian streak to overcome the traits that make me a communist and turn me into a general "bad things are good :^)" dickhead, but contrarian enough that I don't save myself the grief and call myself a "dengist" or something and so crudely leftwash neoliberal insights by going "well, this one worked in China, and China has a communist government!"