This is a word that has been kept in the dark, hidden and avoided. But it is a word that we should all be aware of and using every day.
We should be using it--and it is, in my opinion, a dirty word-- to identify the enemy of democracy, the enemy of justice, the enemy of the middle class and the ninety-nine percent.
The word is neoliberal or neoliberalism. Neoliberals are reptilian, predatory scum, nothing less. They are selfish, exploiting, thieving, ugly monsters. And they make up most of the Democrat party and just about all of the Republican party.
Neoliberals make up the leadership of the DNC.
What does it mean to be a neoliberal?
First, not all neoliberals hide it. Milton Friedman, one of the most evil men in modern history, and the jackals and hyenas he taught at the University of Chicago economics department embraced the name. But that was a few decades ago. Naomi Klein, in her landmark book, The Shock Doctrine, described how Friedman and his students went out in the world aiming at eliminating corporate regulations that protected the environment, workers, consumers. They helped authoritarian dictators to destroy workers, to wipe out democracy. That's who neoliberals are.
George Monbiot describes it as vicious ideology that advocates Extreme individualism and extreme competition.
He told me, in our interview,
"The basic human values are shared by 99% of the population and they are altruism, empathy, kindness, community feeling, and benevolence. We are an extraordinary species but that good nature has been thwarted by powerful and nefarious forces who are the neoliberal group of economists and politicians and journalists who have done everything they possibly can to push selfishness and greed to the front of our minds."And,
"Neoliberalism conceives human society as basically being a market which determines who the winners are and who the losers are and that government should not seek to change those social outcomes. Whoever comes out on top deserves in this sort of social Darwinist framing to come out on top. And whoever comes out of the bottom deserves to come out on the bottom. And if you don't have a job, if you don't have an income, that's your fault. Structural issues like mass unemployment or the closing down of the industries in your town or whatever, that's got nothing to do with it you are unemployed because you are lazy and feckless and you just want to suck the teat of the state."
Monbiot continued to describe how neoliberals think, saying,
"Through the extreme competition and individualism, certain people are going to come to the top and become extremely wealthy. And their wealth is going to trickle down and enrich everyone. So it's going to be good for all of us. That's the story. Inequality is a good thing under neoliberalism, because that allows the rich the total freedom to blaze those trails and to do what they want. And and the richer they become apparently the richer all we'll come despite the fact that it's creating massive inequality nothing should be allowed to interfere with them there should be a trade unions should be basically stamped out taxes on the rich should be stamped out to the greatest extent possible and all public protections should be removed which possibly can be in order to grant them that freedom. And if this sounds like a self-serving racket, that is because it is a self-serving racket."
Monbiot proposes that to defeat and replace neoliberalism we must come up with a new, competing story, is more attractive and believable than the story neoliberals tell, which Monbiot describes here;
"The neoliberal story says the land was thrown into disorder by the nefarious activities of the over-powerful state, the collectivizing state, which even in its apparently benign forms like the u.s. New Deal or the British welfare state will inevitably take us to totalitarianism. "Hayek called his first famous book the Road to Serfdom. And he says that even the New Deal was on a spectrum with Nazism and Stalinism because it crushes individualism. It crushes opportunity and freedom by interfering with the natural hierarchy of winners and losers and therefore throws the land into disorder and will lead to - - to dictatorship but the hero of the story is the entrepreneur, the free market businessperson who, through buying and selling confronts those nefarious and powerful forces of the state and restores order in in the form of the free market society in which individualism and freedom and opportunity will be returned therefore bringing order back to the land."
Monbiot points out that with the 2008 crash, the neoliberal story "hit the rocks," but there was no story to replace it. He proposes a story to replace it. It's described in his book, Out of the Wreckage; A new politics for an age of crisis, and in our interview here. Otherwise, I'll discuss it in my follow-up article on neoliberalism. it will discuss how we need to identify neoliberals in politics and make voters aware of what they are and what they stand for.
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