Neoliberalism poisons everything: How free market mania threatens education — and democracy

Reducing everything—including people—to markets makes democracy impossible, UC Berkeley's Wendy Brown tells Salon

Elias Isquith

Among lefties today, there may be no more toxic and discrediting a label than “neoliberal.” To be called a neoliberal is, generally, to be associated with the worst of capitalism’s excesses — Wall Street greed, union-busting, deregulation, standardized testing, wage theft, privatization, exploitation and so on. In some ways, it’s become a catch-all term of abuse for those who are seen as little more than lackeys for the 1 percent and multinational corporations.

For the purposes of political combat, that’s fair enough. In truth, though, neoliberalism isn’t just another word for “corrupt” or “hyper-capitalist”; it’s a specific political ideology, one that’s much younger than capitalism — and one that plenty of people who are basically pro-capitalism oppose. What’s more, if those of us who oppose neoliberalism misinterpret it as simply another word for capitalism, we make the job of fighting it even more difficult. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a capitalist, after all. But a neoliberal, he most certainly was not.