Neoliberalism as policy and as polemic

I'm not sure I understand what's going on in this Twitter thread:

The "neoliberals" are actually more progressive in economic issues than Sanders supporters. https://t.co/RVkSCLGSZ3 https://t.co/x6sY8Nr4bz

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) October 27, 2017

The linked article is Jonathan Chait's New Study Shows What Really Happened in the 2016 Election New York 06/18/2017, in which Chait reports:

You think the Bernie Sanders movement was about socialism? Not really. Sanders voters have the same beliefs about economic equality and government intervention as Hillary Clinton supporters. On the importance of Social Security and Medicare, Sanders voters actually have more conservative views ...

Where they mainly differ is on international trade and the question of whether politics is a rigged game. The ideological content of Sanders’s platform is not what drew voters. It was, instead, his counter-positioning to Clinton as a clean, uncorrupted outsider.

But the word "neoliberal" doesn't appear in it. It's apparently the quoted passage that Amanda Marcotte interprets as she does in the tweet.

This led to an exchange with MSNBC's Joy Reid.

It actually a real term. It just doesn’t mean what they think it does. And they falsely apply it to liberal women/WOC as a smear. pic.twitter.com/TGpfPXKjdi

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) October 27, 2017

The rose avi crowd has decided it means “woman and especially women of color who refuse to worship Bernie Sanders and thus must be purged.”

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) October 27, 2017

I must admit that I don't know who the "rose avi" is to whom she refers there, and even Mr. Google couldn't clarify it for me. Maybe she's referring to some academics who write on neoliberalism?

Apparently this notion that complaining about neoliberalism means you think women's rights, minority rights and immigrants rights should be low priorities has become a "thing" (slogan, polemic, whatever) among the corporate Democrats. Joy Reid at least notes that neoliberalism is a meaningful term, although her notion of what is seems to be limited. Milton Friedman and his libertarian-monetarist ideas, for instance, don't fit entirely comfortably into the mode of Reagan-Thatcher economics. And neoliberalism is a broader social ideology, as well.

The report on which Chait relies for his analysis is Lee Drutman's Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond:Tensions Between and Within the Two Parties Democracy Fund Voter Study Group June 2017. Chait seems to be inviting his readers to jump to the conclusions that Sanders voters are more conservative than economic issues than Hillary voters, including on support for Social Security and Medicare. Drutman specifies that the Sanders/Clinton comparison is based specifically on their primary voters. Hillary Clinton had much higher name recognition and did especially well in early primaries in 2016. And not all the states have primaries. So those findings are interesting information. But generalizing those to defining characteristics of the divisions within the Democratic Party at this moment.

Bernie's support also skewed distinctly younger than Hillary's, which could account for much of the discrepancy on the intensity of support for Social Security and Medicare. Younger voters are generally not focused on those issues. No, that's not a dig at millennials. It may be partially a factor of age in general, in the sense that people under 35 don't tend to focus on retirement planning very much. But it also has to do with the economic challenges facing people in their 20s and 30s, including the student loan debt that has soared the last 15 years. But it's also because of the massive disinformation campaign over decades against Social Security, with Republicans claiming relentlessly and falsely that Social Security will go broke in a few years. With many Democrats including Barack Obama constantly feeding into that by talking about the alleged need for "entitlement reform." A lot of younger voters just aren't aware of how bogus those claims are.

And it's an even bigger leap from there to what Amanda Marcotte tweeted, apparently taking "neoliberals" to be nothing more than an insult word for Hillary partisans, that neoliberals/Hillary-partisans are more progressive on economic issues than Bernie/New Deal Democrats.

Talk about neoliberalism, by the way, is a particular bugaboo for Jonathan Chait, e.g., How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of Liberals New York 07/16/2017. That piece was devoted to griping that "neoliberal" was just an insult against True Blue Liberals from dirty leftie hippies. That case surely benefits from the fact that outside of the US and Canada, the meaning of "liberal" in economic policy means "free-market," deregulation, anti-union policies. And that's the "liberal" in neoliberalism when it comes to economic policy.

Chait's July piece includes this gripe about the left, "Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz? Neoliberals both." That's a link to a Jacobin piece by Paul Heideman (Bulletproof Neoliberalism 06/01/2014) that, well, doesn't actually say that. It's a review of a book by Philip Mirowski. Citing it, Heideman writes:

Mirowski thinks that this is at least in part a result of the impotence of the loyal opposition — those economists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman who attempt to oppose the more viciously neoliberal articulations of economic theory from within the camp of neoclassical economics. Though Krugman and Stiglitz have attacked concepts like the efficient markets hypothesis (which holds that prices in a competitive financial market reflect all relevant economic information), Mirowski argues that their attempt to do so while retaining the basic theoretical architecture of neoclassicism has rendered them doubly ineffective.

That's different than saying Krugman and Stiglitz are neoliberals. I would push back on the characterization of the two as buying into neoclassical assumptions. Both are Keynesians. Now, neither of them identify as anti-capitalist. And classical economic, neoclassical economics, Keynesian economics all share with neoliberalism some basic assumptions about the functioning and even the normative value of capitalism.

But both Krugman and Stiglitz are leading critics of real existing neoliberalism, even if they haven't roused the academic economic profession out of its stubborn conservatism. (Or conservatism in its liberalism?) Both have been astute critics of problems of the eurozone and of the limitations of Obama's general tendency to embraced neoliberal assumptions on issues like Social Security and the balanced budget.