I consider myself a neoliberal but I’m pretty left wing (pro-business regulation, LGBT rights, welfare), so I was surprised to see this when googling the term.
Posted by Assassiner003
I consider myself a neoliberal but I’m pretty left wing (pro-business regulation, LGBT rights, welfare), so I was surprised to see this when googling the term.
Posted by Assassiner003
19 Comments
There is only one place in the world where people are proud to be neoliberals and buddy. You’re standing in it.
I think how most people generally use neoliberalism, especially the leaders that are referred to refers to that, but also these days neoliberal is basically anything I dislike someone grab the chart, this sub isn’t neoliberal in that sense and is more a social liberal /ordo liberal sub that is third wayish
Neoliberal is when I don’t like something. The more I dislike it the more neoliberal it is.
If you go to, say, the wikipedia page for the term it immediately references the vague and competing definitions of the term. I think any serious attempt to get into it ought to make that clear.
I think this AI overview is just kinda trash
>so I was surprised to see this when googling the term
is living under a rock considered high density housing or does it sound too rural?
[r/newlabour](r/newlabour) just doesn’t have the same ring to it, but this is essentially a Blair-ist Clinton-ist sub. You’ll see people use neoliberal to describe anyone from AOC to Margaret Thatcher so you basically just have to guess what they mean based on context lmao. Within this sub it means mainstream free market left leaning politics à la Blair, Clinton, Obama, Buttigieg, et cetera.
This sub also has a strong technocratic bend to it and a love of policy wonks, iirc it started as a spinoff of [r/badeconomics](r/badeconomics) mocking the frequently awful wish-fulfillment based understandings of economics by populists from either side of the aisle. It thus took its name from an adjacent economics-based ideological label.
AI hasn’t caught up yet. It’s really about worms
That’s the real definition you’re seeing on Google. The one here is ironic, and pretty much completely arbitrary. You wouldn’t see anyone outside this sub go by the sub’s definition.
Neoliberalism is mostly concerned with economics and has little to say about identity politics or sociocultural issues. You could arguably make a neoliberal argument for whatever social issue, but neoliberalism is not particularly capable of analysing those issues beyond a simple economics lens.
Also neoliberalism, just as advertised, is generally sceptical of expansive regulatory regimes and welfare states. Most users on this sub are either explicitly social democrats, or centre-left American liberals so they support both of those things. They aren’t neoliberals, not by the actual definition of it.
Neoliberalism is more a collection of ideas and people than any specific particular idea. It varies from center left to center right generally, although some people I would argue as solidly economically right although they would probably be socially rather centrist.
Are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher left wing
https://preview.redd.it/aztwfbchbivh1.jpeg?width=1206&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f9cbe57820450968c37ec1a615f8ef9593d0c5bc
Why do you need Friedman and Hayek’s ideology to fit under a certain label? Classical and neoliberalism — as distinguished from new liberalism — don’t really fit onto the modern axis very well. Socially these ideologies are in many ways quite radical and have always been. Mill was a great believe in eccentricity and feared the cultural tyranny of the masses. Economically it’s hard to say. The og neoliberals and classical liberals wanted a flat(ish) income tax with a negative component, taxes on consumption and land, and pigouvian taxes. Some of those things might seem deeply right wing, some perhaps more progressive. I suggest you look past these simple labels and read about the ideologies themselves and make up your own mind
Neoliberal is about as meaningless of a word as socialism at this point, where 10 people can provide 11 definitions of what they think it means.
I just say I’m broadly liberal, not leftist or conservative if they want to differentiate any further. Would I ever identify myself as a neoliberal in public though? Absolutely not, not worth the hassle of defining it with people’s preconceived notions of it.
r/neoliberal got “taken over” in 2017 as an offshoot of BadEconomics. This sub was picked because of the tendency of leftists describing anything they disliked as “neoliberal.”
This sub was never intended to represent actual neoliberalism. However, there used to be far more right of centre users and many people who supported neoliberalism. It was fundamentally a grouping of people who believed in market economics. You’ll still see Milton flairs around. Some users have argued that it does mean neoliberalism, but neoliberalism has evolved to what this sub’s beliefs are. That’s pretty revisionist and does not reflect conventional academia.
In 2020, this sub became very popular because of the Dem primaries and later the general election. It became a popular alternative to r/politics for people that got tired of getting shit on for not supporting Bernie Sanders et al. This happened again in 2024, at a smaller scale. That “big tent” shift brought an enormous amount of people whose ideologies are probably too left for the original 2017-2020 crew, while also crowding out almost everybody who was right of centre.
That’s more or less the ELI5 of how you get to the sub today, and why there’s a contrast between the sidebar and academia’s definition of neoliberalism.
The organizing principles around the current leftists/progressives get their core set of ideas from militantly anti-capitalistic – so much so that some of these people take on some illiberal ideas (for example, discouraging open exchange of ideas if the ideas do not conform to their world views).
There’s not a lot of energy behind a movement that espouses policy ideas that try to establish incremental improvement in the society and ceded a lot of ground to these insurgent anti-capitalistic movements that have a lot more energy – if we are being honest with ourselves.
What to do? Just stay the course.
We are a predominantly centre-left, Social Liberal sub that is okay with market capitalism along with all of the other things you’ve listed (i.e. pro-business regulation, LGBTQ+ rights, and welfare). The name r/neoliberal is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at one point we did actually have people who would fit the traditional definition of neoliberalism (i.e. Hayek and Friedman Flairs), though they’re a dying breed at this point.
A lot of people on this sub fail to understand that it is not neoliberalism that is smeared by leftists, but liberals that are smeared by the neoliberal label. There is no serious definition of neoliberalism that isn’t a pejorative for free market liberalism.
This sub isn’t a satire of neoliberalism but it is liberals satirically embracing a pejorative leveled against them.
The Mont Pelerin Society lineage as mentioned in the sidebar is at best aspirational.
I brought this up in a comment (I copied and pasted it below) a week or so ago. Seems like the modern use of neoliberal (center left & empirical) is kind of a shift in the use of the term over the last decade or so. Conservatives/Neocons abandoned it and people who are basically Clinton/Obama democrats who are highly skeptical of DSA type politics filled it.
Neocons creating a power vacuum and having insurgents come in and take over? Unheard of. At least these insurgents are focused on setback laws instead of establishing a Theocracy. Progress not perfection.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1x45aud/comment/pfgvtiw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=2&utm_content=share_button