Have you been feeling that there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party, in the United States? Why is the party which seems to care more about the poor and disadvantaged also so deeply in bed with corporations and financial institutions? Why was Obama, who ran on a progressive platform, so complicit in the economically motivated oil wars in the Middle East, or why did Bill Clinton pave the way for the financial collapse of 2008 by deregulating the financial industry in the U.S.?
In Neoliberalism Simplified, I explained in layman’s terms the greatest coup in history, the plot by the wealthiest class of people to hijack democracy, and return the world to an oligarchy reminiscent of the old economically liberal days of robber barons and oligarch tycoons. I’ve been so pleased to see that story get so much attention and feedback, and I’m stoked that people are eager to learn about this topic.
Far from a wild conspiracy theory, neoliberalism is a a very real movement among the world’s billionaires to take back the power won by the democratic revolutions and American socialist movements, so that they can once again be free to pursue profits by whatever nefarious methods they choose, without concern for how it effects the poor and working classes, or the biosphere. They’d probably bring back slavery, if they could get away with it, and arguably they already have.
Today, I want to help you understand a very important aspect of this coup, and that is the emergence of the “progressive” flavor of neoliberalism, sometimes referred to as Progressive Neoliberalism. This is the controlled opposition, the brand of corporate American liberalism pushed by the Democratic Party for decades, that progressively minded people too often buy hook, line, and sinker. I’m thrilled to dispel the illusions and trickery, and get down to the nitty gritty of exactly why any blue won’t do.
An Ideology Born of Troubled Times
After the emergence in the Reaganomics era of de-regulation and free-wheeling capitalism in the 1980s (which I explained in my first neoliberalism article was a reaction to various economic crises and an end to the golden age of controlled capitalism), the neoliberals who had now firmly solidified their new economic world order still faced a major obstacle: Remaining elements of labor-focused and anti-war sentiment within the democratic party. How did this situation emerge?
Our story begins in the Golden Age of the 1950s and 60s, when New Deal Democrats had taken over the government and economy, made the rich pay their fair share of taxes, and funded sweeping social programs that brought the country back from the brink of economic destruction post WWII, to nearly full employment. To combat this, the 1% was funding small-government Republicans, and steering them towards fighting the new deal. But if the New Deal was so great, how did the Republicans win?
A large segment of Democrats in the Midwest and South supported Reagan, for various reasons. Basically, in the face of economic troubles in the 1970s, disenfranchised white working-class Democrats began to view the party as too focused on helping the poor and African American populations, and not serving their own needs. After Reagan beat a New Deal Democrat in his second election, Democratic leadership decided to move the party to the right, mostly to recover funding from the wealthy, which at the time was going almost entirely to the Republican party, for obvious reasons: Oligarchs only fund political collaborators.
In other words, because the wealthy were mostly funding Republicans, and also because much of their Southern Democrats cared more about their racist culture than ensuring economic rights for all, the Democrats began to lose, and felt they needed to move to the right to start winning again. You can read all about this in the history of the Democratic Party. Essentially, the Democrats were in a state of instability due to racial/cultural/economic complications, amidst the Reagan/Bush years.
However, a new blue-flavored neoliberal era was soon to emerge.
Bill’s Brand New Blue Bait and Switch
In1992, Democrats finally got another president into the White House, largely due to economic unrest, anti-war sentiment, hatred for Bush, and disruption among Republicans created by the Ross Perot campaign.
While Clinton did many arguably good things, such as reduce unemployment and balance the budget, in the economic domain he also continued the progression of neoliberalism that had begun under Reagan; he passed Republican-crafted welfare reforms that were ultimately bad for the poor, aggressively fought financial regulation, and enacted NAFTA against the objections of union leaders, which ultimately set a precedent and opened the doors for the neocolonial outsourcing of labor to other countries, which continued with various free trade agreements passed in the following years.
Note: If you don’t understand what neocolonialism is and why it’s a problem, I highly recommend watching John Perkins speak about his first-hand experience as an economist helping the corporatocracy roll out covert economic takeovers of poor developing nations, to exploit them for their resources and labor. This process begins with predatory IMF loans, then if they don’t comply, sabotage of their regimes, and if that doesn’t work, trumped-up excuses to wage neocolonial war against them. The majority of American military conflicts since WWII have been neocolonial in nature, or in other words, economically motivated. Wars for money.
Most importantly, Bill Clinton pioneered the new branding for the Democratic Party we’re calling Progressive Neoliberalism. In other words, he forged the strategy of the Democratic establishment embracing social liberalism, including gay rights, pro-choice, and gender equality agendas, while simultaneously pushing forward the economically “liberal” policies of neoliberalism.
Note: In economics, liberal means making the government liberal in what it allows corporations to do, which involves removing the rules set by democratic institutions to ensure economic rights. This is something we normally associate with political conservatives, who are usually economically liberal; as one might expect, this free market approach virtually always leads to greater economic inequality, pollution, and instability.
Translation: Remove the rules set democratically by government and unions, and capitalists don’t just behave themselves on their own. They turn whatever tricks they can think of to increase their profits, ethics be damned. That’s economic liberalism, and neoliberalism.
Since the Clinton era, Democrats have more-or-less consistently followed this pattern: embrace social rights, while continuing the erosion of economic rights at home, and abroad. And that is exactly what the corporate neoliberal oligarchs want. This is similar to a “bait and switch,” because the social liberalism is the bait, while the economic liberalism is the switch.
Will That Be Blue or Red Neoliberalism, Serfs?
Let’s take an oligarch’s-eye-view of the unfolding events just described: If you are a modern corporate aristocrat who lives parasitically off of the passive income from the shares in various companies you own, with nothing but luxury and time on your hands to contemplate how best to keep and increase your wealth, what do you do about the fact that you have a sizeable portion of the population who cares tremendously about equality and justice?
If the very foundations of your luxurious oligarch existence are based on economic inequality and injustice, how can you sabotage movements fighting for equality?
One answer is to pour funding into propagandizing and controlling that misguided segment of the population who are on your side, which the oligarchs did by bankrolling the Republican party and steering them towards economic liberalism, and it got Reagan elected. However, this alone is not enough. You must also somehow gain control of at least some segment of the very people who are opposed to you.
To an oligarch facing pitchfork demands for equality, the central question becomes: which inequalities are you willing to sacrifice, to maintain your wealth?
The answer to that question, as we saw with Clinton and the new Progressive Neoliberalism, is that focusing the resistance’s party on social injustices rather than economic ones means you can keep them in your oligarch billionaires’ good graces, and pockets. After all, what does an oligarch like you care if people are able to have abortion, or gay marriage, or trans rights, or gender equality? Individual oligarchs may have their views one way or the other on these social issues, but all pale in comparison to your continued ability to subjugate the poor and working classes, to maintain your life of extreme luxury won by unfettered exploitation.
By funding and thereby creating a new breed of Democrat which merely feigns support for the economic and peace agendas of the left, and instead redirects focus onto their social agendas instead, you can get a significant portion of the left onboard with your neoliberal coup on democracy, without their even realizing what has happened.
And that’s exactly what they did.
From New Deal Labor to Outrage About Pronouns, and Trump
Many have argued, and I would agree, that the part the left played in Trump coming to power is precisely this complicity in the two-fold pivot of the Democratic Party: Abandoning economic causes, and obsessing over social equality, including identity politics. The end result was a disenfranchised blue-collar population whose economic needs were ignored, and whose social values were radically challenged by the mainstream of the Democratic Party. So, they voted for Trump, and he won, a modern iteration of the same thing that happened with Reagan.
Look at this from the perspective of one of these rural American, blue-collar workers, for a moment. The economy is not in your favor, labor rights have eroded, but thanks to decades of neoliberal propaganda, you don’t even understand the nature of the problem. You don’t know what the problem is, but you suspect it might be competition from immigrants, or jobs being shipped overseas. You’ve been convinced government is bad, and the private sector is good. You have no idea that democratic institutions are the only thing between you and total tyranny.
What’s more, your social values are still relatively traditional compared to urban populations, and you are faced daily with a new radical brand of outrage culture about even the slightest “micro-aggression” against these new social values. This is exacerbated by the fact that social media now puts this outrage directly in front of you, showing you first-hand the liquification of all your most cherished social values and roles, with smug social justice warriors demanding that you accept ideas like “gender isn’t real,” or else be labeled a “deplorable.”
Is it any wonder that people in this situation voted for Trump, in spite of all the obvious reasons not to? I’ve written more extensively on the topic of how I believe these radical social changes contributed to the psychology behind the Rise of the Right around the world, here.
Snapping Out of the Progressive Neoliberal Trance
Luckily, thanks mostly to the proliferation of information via the internet, more and more people are awakening to the reality of this blue neoliberal sabotage, as evidenced by the surge of support for economically progressive campaigns such as Bernie Sanders. While some argue that Sanders isn’t even a Democrat, I would go so far as to say that Bernie Sanders is the first real Democrat we have seen since Kennedy, a trend of realignment to the left which I hope to see continue. He is a return to the true, New Deal Democrat ideology.
However, there is still a sizeable segment of the Democratic Party who is totally oblivious to the true nature of the dilemma, who do not even realize the degree to which their economic policies have eroded to the right, who maintain a hyper-focus on identity politics agendas concerning the small but vocal minority, while ignoring economic issues which affect all people regardless of identity. There are also still grievous misconceptions about the nature of socialism, even among the mainstream left.
In a nutshell, this shrinking but still mainstream Democrat population is continuing to buy the Progressive Neoliberal narrative. They are still willing to support corporate politicians like Biden, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg, as long as they champion cherished social causes, even as they keep minimum wage low, facilitate neocolonial wars, and support the private healthcare disease-profiteering.
This is what we have to put to an end; we must talk about economics, we must talk about democratic socialism, we must show it’s many successes in other countries, where the social AND economic equality and stability of Scandinavian and European nations set an example we can strive for. The solution they have pioneered is a mixed economy, a combination of capitalist market with socialist guidance and support from the democratic state, which is also the secret behind the rapid growth of various “East Asian Tiger” nations, as well.
Most of all, we must help all people on both sides of the political spectrum to see clearly that the parasitic oligarchs who have orchestrated the neoliberal coup on our democracy are the true enemies of the people, and that the solution must be to remove their slimy tentacles from our government. Only when the government truly represents the people and our collective interests will we ever really be free; it can never do that, so long as it’s controlled by the wealthy.
Social justice is not enough, we must have economic justice first and foremost, for it affects all people, of all identities. It is the unifying element among otherwise separated groups, with differing ideals and motivations.
In the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:
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