Neoliberalism and Its Discontents

While agreeing with much of what Ezra Klein and Ben Adler have to say about the declining fortunes of neoliberal punditry, I think they're both far too harsh in their assessment.

The neoliberal school of thought has and had significant failings. Still, I think the primary cause of its declining fortunes is that, as tends to happen with once-ascendant political tendencies, it had a lot of successes. The most persuasive neoliberal ideas have become conventional wisdom. The netroots shares the neoliberal critique of interest group brokerage as a model of party-building. Absolutely nobody nowadays makes the sort of arguments that you heard from the 1980s-vintage left about the possibility of winning elections purely through increasing voter turnout. And a lot of the low-hanging policy fruit has already been implemented. Nobody thinks TANF will be re-reformed as an open-ended entitlement. Nobody thinks NAFTA will be rescinded. Nobody thinks we're going to re-regulate the airlines or restore the government-sponsored telephone monopoly. I even think people have privately reconciled themselves to the fact that race-based affirmative action is going to fade away. And so on and so forth.

What tends to happen when a political tendency achieves a fair amount of success, however, is that what continues to make that tendency distinctive are precisely those strains with the least appeal and cogency. Similarly, insofar as neoliberals succeeded in reformulating a more politically viable conception of liberalism they've tended to render their own habits of mind less relevant since the revived, more viable liberalism wants more self-confident, more earnest advocates.

Last, though, it's worth saying something about foreign policy. Very little about the original formulation of neoliberalism in the 1980s is actually relevant to 21st century national security issues. Nevertheless, several important neoliberal institutions -- notably The New Republic and the Democratic Leadership Council -- adopted some post-9/11 national security commitments with little logical relationship to the neoliberal critique of Democratic Party complacency. It's notable that very few of the major early neoliberals were big Iraq hawks -- Bill Galston argued persuasively against the war, Elaine Kamarck supported Howard Dean, Michael Kinsley opposed the war, Joe Klein kinda sorta opposed the war, etc. -- this was very much a latter-day add-on to the ideology. Those post-9/11 security commitments proved politically catastrophic for the Democratic Party, substantively catastrophic for American national security.

Consequently, people who became involved in intra-family disputes during the 21st century tend to associate soi-disant centrist ideologues with a militaristic natioanl security agenda rather than with, say, cap-and-trade pollution controls, the Earned Income Tax Credit, or efforts to eliminate disincentives to work from anti-poverty spending.