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Notes -
In the spirit of continuing last weeks discussion, and the suggestion by @georgioz to define an exonym like Neoliberalism versus one that is more divisive such as fascism. The term "neoliberal" was first used as a pejorative term by the socialist left to describe US economic policy as far back as the 1930's, however, its was quickly defined in 1951 by Milton Friedman arguably the best known neoliberal, who proudly took the definition and ran with it, which has continued to the current day. This has not stopped it from being used, primarily by the left as a slur--some prose examples are Cornell West calling Ta'Nehisi Coates a neoliberal for his lack of criticism of wall street. To me, there are 5 key features of a neoliberal, they are as follows:
Some studies have indicated that those describing themselves as neoliberal tend to score higher in areas such as self-efficacy, self-esteem, self-reliance, but have poorer health outcomes. Similar to the term "capitalist" which also was used as a slur by the socialist left for those interested in free trade and private profits, it was adopted to describe those who were unapologetically "pro-business", specifically large business and unfettered economic growth through almost any means possible.
I would argue that neoliberal has more meaning than some of the terms we discussed last week because its proponents have actively adopted it and have proudly worn the label for decades. More importantly, the vast majority of both proponents and detractors would largely agree on its definition, while other terms like woke, fascist, etc are more commonly used as a slur than a self descriptor, thus have had significant "definition creep".
What are your thoughts?
Hmm. Can you remind me of the point being made here? You're trying to differentiate neoliberal as an exonym from woke because people accept the label neoliberal but not woke? If that's the case then suppose nothing at all changes about the population, you still have people who believe and espouse every bit of this cluster's beliefs but refuse to accept any label. These neoliberals were highly related, constantly quoting each other and repeating each other's arguments. When you met someone who was in favor of one of these policies you knew with a 95% chance they'd support all the other policies but they just insisted there was no legitimate way to refer to their memeplex. What would you do then? Until we can square that circle I'm not sure what the point of the comparison is or even what your point is. If woke isn't meaningful then what can I call the highly correlated cluster of beliefs?
On the level of criticism of your definition of neoliberal I think you have some sneer phrases baked in. Few like to be associated with the phrase "trickle down" preferring something like supply side policies. "Too big to fail" also has some negative connotations. A neoliberal would say it was a policy failure to let banks become too big to fail but bailouts were still the prudent option given the circumstances, truncating it to that is ignoring important parts of their understanding of the events and their real concern for moral hazard. Neoliberal tends to approximately map to neoclassical economics, basically Adam Smith but with modern economic modeling.
Wait wtf, you’re on here? :marseygasp:
I'm surprised you're surprised, whoever you are
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