Neoliberals think that the state should play a smaller role in managing the economy and meeting public needs, and they oppose obstacles to the free exchange of goods and labor. Neoliberalism, in the American context, can be understood as a reaction against mid-century liberalism. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. (Those on the right call them Communists.) Today, we call these people progressives. They wanted to save capitalism from its own failures and excesses. On the contrary, they thought that government programs and strong labor unions made capitalist economies more productive and more equitable. Those mid-century liberals were not opposed to capitalism and private enterprise. And they thought collective bargaining would insure that workers could afford the goods the economy was producing.
Liberals were people who believed in using government to regulate business and to provide public goods-education, housing, dams and highways, retirement pensions, medical care, welfare, and so on. Roosevelt and came to stand for policy packages like the New Deal and, later on, the Great Society. It’s confusing, because in the nineteen-thirties the term “liberal” was appropriated by politicians such as Franklin D. What’s “neo” about neoliberalism is really what’s retro about it. Is that what has landed us in the mess we’re in? Yet for forty years neoliberalism was the principal economic doctrine of the American government. “Neoliberalism” has been called a political swear word, and it gets blamed for pretty much every socioeconomic ill we have, from bank failures and income inequality to the gig economy and demagogic populism.
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