Against "Neoliberalism"

Not the notion, but the term - for it has come to mean in certain quarters of the left (or perhaps the Left) what "socialism" has come to mean among the broad right, that is, "something (or someone) I do not like".

But unlike the bugbear of right-wing thought, the neoliberal is a phantasm. Where are those who call themselves neoliberals?  If one cares to look, you might find a few who call themselves such with their tongues in their cheeks, part of the long tradition of folks appropriating for themselves an exonym given in malice. 

Per Wikipedia (which represents consensus if nothing else) some key people in neoliberalism are four economists (Friedman, Hayek, von Mises, James M. Buchanan, Greenspan) and three politicians from the 80's (Pinochet, Thatcher, and Reagan)

And fair enough, there does seem to be an intellectual thread connecting these politicians and economists. But did they call themselves neoliberals, and their program and ideology neoliberalism?

Say what you will about Stalin, he would at least have agreed with your description of him as a communist. And then you could have (from a safe distance) had an argument with him about the merits of communism.

But Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet didn't call themselves neoliberals, they called themselves "conservatives", and if their policy did more to smash a status quo than maintain it, recall that what conservatives have always aimed to conserve is first and foremost traditional hierarchies of status and power.

To that end they reached for the thought that Friedman called neoliberalism, and used as a cudgel in their efforts. It is important, however, to separate questions of the veracity of that school of economic thought from from its use by conservatives as a bludgeon. Whether it was half true, or all true, or the most transparently obvious bullshit ever devised, it could serve as a weapon against social democracy and those who would challenge traditional hierarchies. The recent experience of American politics ought to disillusion any of you, my dear readers, who thought that academic thinking was in any way informing conservative thought and action, rather than being assembled as a post-hoc justification.

So there is "neoliberalism" the narrow thing. A term to describe a school of economic thought that 80's politicians used to justify their economic policies.

And neoliberalism the broad thing?

Why, judging it from its use on Twitter, it can apparently encompasses everything from social democrats to anarcho-captalists, and politicians from Trump to Obama, and those are only the uses I have with my own eyes.

That is, it is now a word that means means nothing and everything, once again a weapon to be used against ones political enemies - this time by lefties against anyone insufficiently left-wing for their tastes, but sufficiently of the left as to be mortified by comparison to Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet.

This is dumb.

I am not so stiff as to be willing to die on the hill named "WORDS HAVE TO HAVE MEANINGS". There is place in language for phatic words and phrases that can mean nothing and everything.

But as neoliberal now occupies a similar position to "motherfucker" - an insult in itself, devoid of real semantic content, I humbly submit that it no longer be entertained as a serious term for or unit of analysis.

As that will most assuredly be ignored, I will then loudly repeat myself:

"NEOLIBERAL IS NOW A MEANINGLESS TERM. YOU COULD FIND AND REPLACE EVERY INSTANCE OF NEOLIBERAL WITH MOTHERFUCKER AND THERE WOULD BE NO LOSS OF MEANING"