He’s a Third-Way Neoliberal.
The first thing to explain is that “neoliberalism” is not a lefty political/economic ideology. It’s conservative (I’ll explain why it has the word “liberal” in it below). Reagan was the first neoliberal President, and he did the most to reshape American policy as neoliberalist. Clinton, Obama, HRC, and Biden are not and were not socialists. They are “third way neoliberals.”
Here’s why it’s called neoliberalism.
In the late 18th and early 19th century, a political ideology arose that is often called “liberalism.” [1] The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas defines “liberalism:”
“It is widely agreed that fundamental to liberalism is a concern to protect and promote individual liberty. This means that individuals can decide for themselves what to do or believe with respect to particular areas of human activity such as religion or economics. The contrast is with a society in which the society decides what the individual is to do or believe. In those areas of a society in which individual liberty prevails, social outcomes will be the result of a myriad of individual decisions taken by individuals for themselves or in voluntary cooperation with some others.” [2]
It’s useful to distinguish between political and economic liberalism—a point that will take a while to explain.
It’s paradoxical, but important, to understand that all the major political parties and movements in the US endorse political liberalism, or claim to. The disagreement is how to honor individualism, but notice that, in the major policy disagreements, everyone argues from within a frame of promoting individual freedom (gun control is about the freedom to carry a gun or the freedom to speak freely without worrying about shot, the freedom to be LGBTQ+ or the freedom to condemn them).
In the nineteenth century, economic liberalism advocated no governmental intervention in the “free market,” saying that the “free market” would better determine prices, wages, and working conditions. In Britain, this led to the potato famine among other catastrophes. In the US, it led to a cycle of booms and busts, outrageous working conditions, and environmental degradation that tanked the economy (I have to meet a person who advocates this kind of liberalism who knows much of anything about the 19th century economic cycles, working conditions, or the dust bowl). Because liberalism was such a disaster—worldwide—as was shown in 1929, a lot of people started considering other options. There were, loosely, four options that countries chose.
In the early twentieth century, a lot of people argued that liberalism as a political philosophy could be separated from liberalism as an economic philosophy (in other words, economic and political liberalism aren’t necessarily connected). But many people argued (and still do) that the commitment to a political practice (authoritarianism, democracy, monarchy) can’t be separated from an economic practice (mercantilism, autarky, capitalism, and so on). Stalinists and fascists (who have a lot in common, rhetorically) endorsed that (false) notion that political and economic commitment are the same, and insis(ed)t that, if you choose this economic system, you are necessarily choosing that political system.[3] They were wrong, and they’re still wrong, but that’s a different post. [4]
In the 19th and early 20th century, there were a lot of kinds of socialism. That’s why Communist Manifesto spends about a third of the book arguing with other socialists about why they should be their kind of socialist. That’s also why various activists who were conservative in terms of things like sexuality but radical in terms of economic issues sometimes called themselves socialist (such as Dorothy Day), and were not endorsing Stalinism.
In the early twentieth century, a lot of people believed that “individuals can decide for themselves what to do or believe with respect to particular areas of human activity such as religion,” but the government can “intervene” in regard to issues like food safety, accuracy in advertising, fraud, consciously fatal work conditions, exploitative contracts, deliberate manipulations of the market, and so on.
In other countries, this was called democratic socialism, but FDR (if I have my history correct) called it liberalism. Supposedly, he thought that people would reject the “socialism” term, and his political agenda was liberal (but his economic one wasn’t). And he’s right. I can’t even begin to estimate the number of people who say, “SOCIALISM ALWAYS ENDS IN DISASTER” (they do like them some caps lock) when someone wants to reject economic “liberalism.” It simply isn’t true that rejecting economic liberalism ends in disaster, if people maintain political liberalism. On the contrary, if people try to maintain economic liberalism at the expense of political liberalism, disaster ensues.
A society with political, but not economic, liberalism is one that doesn’t require you to have particular religious, ideological, sexual, or even political ideologies, as long as it’s all consenting adults, and there’s no force involved. The basic premise of liberalism is that your right to swing your fist stops at my face, and so a society with political liberalism is always arguing about that point of contact.
Economic liberalism has a different problem. One of the problems is empirical. The contradiction at the heart of economic liberalism is that there is force involved—no market is free. The coercion might be the government coercing businesses into behaving certain ways, businesses coercing each other, businesses coercing employees, employees coercing business. Paradoxically, the only way to maintain the ability of the individual to decide for themselves (the core of liberalism) is if the government intervenes to ensure that the market doesn’t enable some individuals (or corporations) to engage in force.
Economic liberalism as a political program got hammered by the Depression and the needs of a war economy. Post-war, there were people who argued that we’d gone too far in the direction of government intervention in the market, and we needed to go back to economic liberalism. They’re called neoliberals, because it’s a new form of the classical liberalism of the 19th century. They argue that we should let the markets take care of almost everything. As I said, Reagan was a neoliberal.
Some people felt we went too far in the direction of neoliberalism, and, while we didn’t need the governmental intervention of LBJ’s Great Society, a market completely free of government control ground the faces of the poor, destroyed God’s creation, and landed us in unwise (and endless) wars (it’s important to understand how much of this political agenda is religious). The idea was that these goals could be achieved by the government working with the market to establish incentives. This kind of person is typically called a “Third Way Neoliberal.” They want to preserve as much freedom in the markets as is compatible with legitimate community ends. They support capitalism as the most desirable economic system.
Whether that’s possible is an interesting argument. Whether it leads to Stalin’s kind of socialism isn’t.[5] And that’s what Clinton, Obama, HRC, and Biden are and were. Third Way Neoliberals.
[1] There are never just two political ideologies at play in any given era, so people who think, “If you aren’t this, then you must that” are always reasoning fallaciously.
[2] Charvet, John. “Liberalism.” New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, vol. 3, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005, pp. 1262-1269. Accessed 24 June 2020.
[3] Right now, we have this weird situation in which a lot of people who claim to be neoliberal in terms of economic agenda are arguing for fascism in the political agenda. David Neiwert has made that argument about Rush Limbaugh, for instance.
[4] If you want a really good book about the Nazi economy, and how it ended up being not what fascists supposedly want, Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction is deeply researched and elegantly argued.
[5] While some democracies have slid into authoritarianism, slowly voting in or allowing increasingly authoritarian policies to stand, they haven’t slowly moved into communism. Communism arises from people being in desperate situations, and there’s a violent revolution of some kind. As someone said, probably Orwell, you have to be in a desperate situation to be willing to give up ownership of your last cow.
