Social Policy in Ontario

This year, I have watched too many otherwise reasonable people devote their time and energy to non-existent threats. This is especially tragic at a historic moment overflowing with very genuine and material threats.

Let me speak out against the two most prominent fictitious concepts of our time. And let me urge you to resolve, in the cleansing light of the new year, never to utter these terms again.

Neoliberalism

During a year when ancient forms of extremism reawakened from their burial grounds and spread their dark stains, a surprising number of people took aim instead at a nefarious movement known as “neoliberalism.”

It was central to an awful war of words this week in which the Harvard scholar Cornel West publicly denounced the essayist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates as “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle.” Both men have devoted their careers to the racial intolerance of U.S. society, but in the view of Mr. West, his younger colleague had failed to condemn capitalism, market economies and individualism – or Barack Obama for similar crimes of neoliberalism. Mr. Coates tried to defend himself, but after the white-supremacist figurehead Richard Spencer endorsed Mr. West’s claim, Mr. Coates deleted his popular social-media account.

The term was also used frequently by Steve Bannon, the extreme-right onetime aide to U.S. President Donald Trump, to denounce mainstream economic policy, and by Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour Party Leader, for the same purpose. The plot, it seems, is widespread.

The problem is that there has never been a politician or thinker or party leader who has declared him or herself “neoliberal” – not one. The idea exists only in the minds of people opposed to it.

There was once an actual thing called neoliberalism. It existed for a few years, mainly in the 1980s, within the world of international development. Neoliberal development theory, known for the slogan “trade not aid,” tried to help once-authoritarian countries restore functioning markets. It was often heavy-handed, and was abandoned after it inflamed and hurt those at the receiving end.

Years later, this specialized term was expanded into a more generalized name for – well, anything one sees as excessively market-oriented, or insufficiently progressive. Countless books and articles have tried to define it; they tend to be vague and all-encompassing shopping lists. It is sometimes used, by people on the very far-left, as a euphemism for “capitalist” – but far more often, and by a far wider group, as a simple name for “things I don’t like.”