This is not any kind of formal academic gloss on one of the most contested and considered terms in contemporary political history, neoliberal. I’m not qualified to write one of those. This is an attempt to convey what a lot of people mean when they use the term “neoliberal” in the context of 21st century progressive politics and what it meant in the recent past. This is a scribbling about my perception of how a contested term rose and fell and changed over time. I will leave the meaning of neoliberalism to others. But “neoliberalism” meant something in left-of-center political debates ten or fifteen years ago, and it was used like a comma, and now it means something different or less and I think about it a lot.
Traditionally neoliberalism had much more to do with conservatism than liberalism. It was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who brought us a neoliberal revolution in the 1970s and 80s, after all. But you can read history books about that. In 2021 “neoliberal” as a pejorative tends to mean those who