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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Hahaha. They ban anyone whose a Republican there. That’s not “economically right”

I agree the term neoliberal has been butchered. And the people now call themselves neoliberal are more like ordoliberal or neo-neoliberal.

But the people who use the neoliberal label today are in the American context center-left.

They are right of tankies.

I doubt they ban Republicans for being too much in favour of economic liberalisation.

They had a purge about 18 months ago. Banned anyone who gave away any signifier of not Biden voter.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. I consider myself a liberal but in the American context I’m not. Because in popular usage the term changed.

Huh. That probably says more about Reddit mods than it does about neoliberalism to be fair, though.

Think the popular definition of it has changed even outside Reddit. Now it just means establishment Dem who supports every spending bill out of the left.

Don’t get me wrong I’m old school Pinochet loving neoliberal.

Well as someone with leftist inclinations I would raise the point that neoliberalism remains, in the grand scheme of things, a fundamentally right-wing ideology, since it supports loosening the regulations on private businesses and dismantling direct state involvement in the economy.

That’s just means it’s right of where you stand on the political spectrum.

Neoliberal subreddit universally supported build back better (a huge government expansion) and Georgist taxes.

It’s become leftist with a sprinkle of market forces.

This is a bit of a semantic argument but I feel obliged to tell you are America-brained. No-one else in the world thinks that a loosely regulated, globalist, capitalist economic system is 'leftist' because of high government spending and land-value taxes. I do agree that the strain of neoliberalism you see in the Biden administration and on the /r/neoliberal subreddit is not quite that espoused by Reagan and Thatcher, though.

There’s no such thing as true center right or center left. Just like there’s no such thing as true east or west. Directions are always relative to something else.

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