Varieties of Neoliberalism

Some people probably find this topic obscure and pointless, but even though "neoliberalism" sort of names nothing and sort of names everything, I think it's actually a pretty important topic. And Mickey Kaus makes an important point about it:

The word "neoliberalism," at least in its domestic context, was coined by The Washington Monthly's Charles Peters in 1978. (It didn't start, as David Brooks declared, with a Kinsley tax editorial in 1981). Recently, the editors and former editors of Peters' magazine, The Washington Monthly, had a dinner to celebrate his 80th birthday. Out of the approximately 45 Peters proteges there, how many had supported the Iraq War? My guess is no more than 8. Peters himself certainly didn't support the war. Neither did Kinsley. Monthly alum James Fallows (who wasn't at the dinner) tried to stop it with cautionary articles in The Atlantic. The war's a New Republic thing--and a David Brooks thing--not a Washington Monthly thing.

But, of course, there's more to life than magazine writers and the association of neoliberalism with the war has other sources than just The New Republic. In particular, the Democratic Leadership Council's leadership strongly backed the war as did most of its associated politicians. In his book, Ken Baer describes the DLC as something of an effort to fuse the nascent neoliberal movement with something salvageable from the conservative Democrat tradition of the South. Similarly, you might think of TNR as a fusion between neoliberalism and Israeli nationalism (and then, of course, there's Joe Lieberman who's all three). In all cases, you wind up with a similar result on, say, education reform issues but divergent results on national security issues.