Why YSK: I’ve noticed in recent years more people using “neoliberal” to mean “Democrat/Labor/Social Democrat politicians I don’t like”. This confusion arises from the different meanings “liberal” has in American politics and further muddies the waters.
Neoliberalism came to the fore during the 80’s under Reagan and Thatcher and have continued mostly uninterrupted since. Clinton, both Bushs, Obama, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Johnson, and many other world leaders and national parties support neoliberal policies, despite their nominal opposition to one another at the ballot box.
It is important that people understand how neoliberalism has reshaped the world economy in the past four decades, especially people who are too young to remember what things were like before. Deregulation and privatization were touted as cost-saving measures, but the practical effect for most people is that many aspects of our lives are now run by corporations who (by law!) put profits above all else. Neoliberalism has hollowed out national economies by allowing the offshoring of general labor jobs from developed countries.
In the 80’s and 90’s there was an “anti-globalization” movement of the left that sought to oppose these changes. The consequences they warned of have come to pass. Sadly, most organized opposition to neoliberal policies these days comes from the right. Both Trump and the Brexit campaign were premised on reinvigorating national economies. Naturally, both failed, in part because they had no cohesive plan or understanding that they were going against 40 years of precedent.
So, yes, establishment Democrats are neoliberals, but so are most Republicans.
Don’t confuse Identity Politics, aka “We care only about that inequality which doesn’t involve the priviledges of wealth” as leftwing.
Those who disregard the biggest inequality of treatment there is by a HUGE margin (that of wealth) and only care about those inequalities which can be “fixed” without putting their own inherited priviledges (usually from being born in the high middle-class and above) at risk aren’t lefties as they’re not really fighting for the greatest good for the greatest number.
The kind of liberalism that ignores the power of money and ownership to constraint others’ freedom of action is incompatible with getting the greatest outcome for the greatest number because they see restrictions of accumulation of wealth and resources and anti-freedom and it’s been painfully obvious for decades that maximization of the greatest good for the greatest number is the exact opposite of the direction of concentration of wealth and ownership we have been travelling on.
Turning the other way while migrants drown in the Mediterranean isn’t “Identity Politics” and the insistence on cultural homogenization and labeling plurinationalism “Identity Politics” is very typical of European right-wing social ideology that pervades the parties in power.
Now you’re just using an “appeal to emotion” falacy.
A person who genuinelly wants to help others LOGICALLY starts by the ones most in need, and those are mainly those living in horrible conditions in refugee camps, not those who have a few thousand dollars to pay a trafficker.
Your barelly disguised neoliberal take on Equality with “oh so obvious” late XXth century marketing shaped appeals to emotion and eternaly repeated unthinking slogans which are fashionable within certain tribes (and hence social tokens of group membership amongst that crowd, who really are just in it for the sweet social ego-stroking) isn’t left-wing, it isn’t even a genuine want to do good by others, since it doesn’t obbey even the basic logic of “to do the most good you start by those in most need” something which would force looking at wealth inequality.
The internal-inconsistencies needed to exclude wealth inequality from that bundle of easilly parroted marketing slogans that portrays to be a political theory that fights Equality are so large, that even the idea that help should be allocated by need not by “insert easilly visibly characteristice people were born with” is seen as a threat.
Caring about migrants’ lives isn’t an appeal to emotion.
Your very first sentence on your post was about how those who disagree with your politics are “ignoring people dying”.
People making genuine, logical and well-founded arguments don’t start by claiming that those who disagree with them are closing their eyes to the death of others.
Yours wasn’t just an Appeal to Emotion Falacy, it was a particularly bad taste and sleazy one.
It’s particularly notable that you’ve spent a great deal of time accusing me of leveraging logical fallacies while you’ve spent basically no time denying my contention that across the political spectrum European parties are starkly against immigration whatsoever, with the farthest right wings of them arguing that there’s no obligation to recognize the citizenship of colonial nationals.
If that doesn’t work for you we can talk about how Romani are treated in Europe too.
I pointed out the error in your implit assumption in your “argument” that Identity Politics counts as being leftwing.
A self-proclaimed fight for Equality that doesn’t address the worst kinds of equality out there (usually wealth-related) is at best a “theatre of equality” and at worst profound hypocrisy.
Now, if the Democrats more broadly weren’t quite as lavishingly a “party of business” and “relaxed about wealth” one might say that perhaps it really was a party fighting for Equality and were Identity Politics was but a facet of a greater fight, in which case it would all count as leftwing, only that’s not at all the case - if you loudly help a few whilst activelly fucking up the many (often covertly fucking up the very people you just loudly proclaimed you helped), that’s just the far too common image management anchored on late XX-century marketing theories, not acting out of principle.
So there really isn’t much leftwing-anything in the US Democrats.
As for your idea of the European politicial spectrum, it really doesn’t match what I’ve seen having lived in 4 different countries in Europe and speaking the language of a few more - you might be confusing what gets shown about European politics in the English language media you frequent (which is usually the loudmouths saying outrageous things and a handful of government measures here and there which can be spinned - whether they really are or not - as anti-immigrant) with the actual totality of the European political spectrum.
From what I’ve observed, even now when there are a lot more anti-immigrant populists on the scene than in the heady pre-2008-crash days, they still represent maybe at most 1/4 of all the political spectrum (granted, I don’t know the politics of EE that much, so maybe it’s more there)
PS: And just for clarity, I’m not saying that in social terms the Democrats aren’t more “fair” than a lot of Europe’s political spectrum, what I’m saying is that because of their positions on every other angle of equality and on advancing the general principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” (which they are not, at all, advancing, quite the contrary) their seemingly socially more fair side might very well be just theatre and even if it’s not, it’s not enough leftwing to make up for the broader concern with making the most people live better (as imperfect as it is) in most of the European Political Spectrum.