It’s hard to think of a word with a bigger image problem than “neoliberalism.” For one thing, it’s vague. When the intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers heroically defined it, he teased out four distinct meanings. But in spite of its vagaries, neoliberalism seems to stand for something unpopular.

“In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis,” writes dissident right-winger Julius Krein in the New York Times, “the Reagan-Bush-Clinton neoliberal consensus seems intellectually and politically bankrupt.” Krein claims the desire to overturn the neoliberal consensus unites politicians as disparate as Marco Rubio and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But liberal stalwart Jonathan Chait rejects this claim. Whatever neoliberalism might have meant once, he argues, it is now primarily a favorite slur of the far left.

Liberalism is out. Class politics, it seems, is back. And yet, despite the Trump-Tucker Carlson-Brexit right and the Sanders-Warren-Corbyn left, there’s a transnational community of self-professed neoliberals trying to reclaim neoliberalism and — maybe — the political center. They voted Vox’s Matt Yglesias their Shill of the Year.

These neoliberals are savvy and self-aware. Beyond the jokes, they purport to stand for a pragmatic, forward-looking political vision that finds a viable path between the Scylla and Charybdis of populist authoritarianism and socialist resentment.

Jeremiah Johnson, a director of the Neoliberal Project and host of the Neoliberal Podcast, suggests neoliberals are “capitalist without being free-market fundamentalist.” They use “real-world policy research” to “update and modernize liberal political philosophy for today’s world.”

Sam Bowman, former executive director of the British Adam Smith Institute, told me “there needed to be a word for people who are classical liberals but okay with redistribution, globalist in mindset, focused on economic growth and driven by consequences and pragmatism rather than first principles.”

Bowman settled on neoliberal, rebranding his formerly libertarian think tank.

Politically speaking, the neoliberals are liberals in that they value individual freedoms, cultural pluralism, and markets. But the “neo” is meant to indicate a reconstructed liberalism, one that avoids libertarian pitfalls — intellectually, politically, and policy-wise.

“A neoliberal is someone who believes that markets are astonishingly good at creating wealth, but not always good at distributing wealth,” Bowman wrote in an influential statement. “We’re comfortable with redistribution, in principle.”

These neoliberals are trying to wrench the mantle of market-based policies away from the more Reaganite/laissez faire version championed by the Republican Party while insisting that reformed liberalism — not democratic socialism — is the best hope for a functioning left.

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Trade, and Globalization

The neoliberal worldview is unapologetically modern. At its heart, it’s liberal, market-based, and globalized. To them, that can only be a good thing.

“Just like most people, we’re looking for a richer, more just, more free society for everyone,” Johnson says. “Increased immigration, free trade, market economies with robust welfare states, liberal social values, and a technocratic case-by-case approach to policy are the best way to get to the good society.”

On Reddit, the neoliberal subreddit FAQ calls markets “paramount,” not just as “an expression of individual liberty” but as the “driving force of economic prosperity.” The system of “free exchange and movement between countries makes us richer and has led to an unparalleled decline in global poverty.”

The state plays important roles for neoliberals, too. At a minimum, it prevents monopoly, creates stable monetary and legal frameworks, and relieves “acute misery and distress.”

In an ingenuous summary of the “neoliberal mind,” British thinker Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute writes that “neoliberals are committed to economic growth and believe there are no limits to its potential.” In an oddly cheery statement in the face of climate change, Pirie says neoliberals “believe the world can continue indefinitely to become richer, and that there are no limits to growth.”

As self-professed consequentialists, neoliberals insist these values are proven by their fruits. The combination of property rights, market reforms, strong but fair states, and globalized trade and investment are lifting marginalized people out of poverty.

Take for instance this analysis by former Neoliberal Shill of the Year, Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith. Through diplomacy, industrial policy, and education, countries as varied as Poland, Mexico, and Turkey “are becoming sources not just of cheap products for rich-world consumers, but of important technological innovations, burgeoning market demand, and even competition.”

This is neoliberalism in action.

More than any other political identity today, neoliberals believe in the possibility and reality of progress. More people are better off than ever before. They have higher levels of literacy, longer life expectancy, and greater wealth. When given a choice, neoliberals argue, people chose to live lives engaged with the global market. They warn against fetishizing disappearing ways of life.

Daniel Immerwahr recently argued that one of the key factors driving down American imperialism in the 20th century was improved logistics, standardization, globalization, and synthetic alternatives to important natural resources. Immerwahr argues that in lieu of imperial territories, after World War II, the United States was able to impose standards and institutions on the rest of the world. U.S. hegemony both fostered global trade and reoriented the market — indeed, the world — to its advantage.

The neoliberal response to these claims, I think, would be that the upside of standardizing and opening markets was so great that Immerwahr’s critique doesn’t hold water.

Neoliberals Old and New

Neoliberals trace their lineage to an earlier school of economists who attempted to both reclaim and redefine market economics.

As Scott Davies explains in Arc Digital, “neoliberalism” was originally coined by the German economist Alexander Rüstow. During the Great Depression and in its aftermath, the reputation of liberal economics was in the doldrums. A frequent “border crosser” between socialism and liberalism, Rüstow hoped neoliberalism could be a Third Way between these rival systems.

Rüstow described neoliberalism as involving a “free economy, strong state.” He wanted the state to enforce competition through extreme anti-trust policies to curtail unfair advantages in the market.

Believing that legislation was downstream from elite opinion, the neoliberal economists in Europe and America sought to restore the reputation of market economics against socialism, fascism, and even FDR’s New Deal.

They accepted Rüstow’s suggestion of “neoliberalism” and called themselves the Mont Pelerin Society, after the Swiss town they met in.

The Society ended up dividing between Rüstow-style advocates of a Third Way neoliberalism and proponents of more classical liberal economics. One of the hardline liberals once stormed out of a meeting calling the Third Way advocates a “bunch of socialists.”

Ultimately, the first generation of the Mont Pelerin Society, interested in reconstructing liberalism, gave way to full-throated defenses of markets and marketization.

Through the increasingly strident work of economists like Milton Friedman, this type of neoliberalism became a powerful part of right-wing and centrist attacks on the faltering New Deal order. When people talk about Thatcherism, Reaganomics (or Rogernomics and Ruthenasia), it’s a neoliberalism derived from this stream of thought.

Meanwhile Third Way neoliberalism (also called ordoliberalism) helped propel the West German economic miracle immediately after World War II. Over time, this “social market economy” gave way to a more generic welfare state.

Today’s neoliberals believe that, like their forebears, they’re at a “cross-current” of opinion. The r/Neoliberal subreddit (with some 50,000 subscribers) explicitly connects itself to this history and the Mont Pelerin Society. “This sub serves as a forum to continue that project against new threats posed by the populist left and right,” its About Us reads.

If anything, the present neoliberals are closest to the earliest intentions of those first neoliberals: to reform market economics to be efficient and equitable. “And frankly,” writes Sam Bowman, “lots of libertarians hate them for being, in their eyes, too statist or leftist.”

Most of the first generation of neoliberals were academics and intellectuals. They set up conferences, think tanks and professorships. While current neoliberals have access to these kinds of things, what is really distinctive about them is that they are a Very Online movement.

Public opinion isn’t just swayed by expertise filtering down from elite institutions into mainstream publications. It can be crowdsourced.

“Shills”

Rehabilitating neoliberalism in “the discourse” is an effort at reclamation. Jeremiah Johnson of the Neoliberal Project told me “there’s a long history of political groups reclaiming insults” and “there’s no reason the same can’t be done with ‘neoliberal.’” He’s right, of course: Whigs, Tories, Suffragettes, Impressionists, Neoconservatives — all extremely influential movements acting under reappropriated names.

This initial reappropriation has given neoliberals license to reclaim other political insults. It jibes neatly with the ironic tone of online politics. As the Irish neoliberal Conor Duffy told me, “taking insults and using them ourselves” is part of reclaiming the neoliberal identity.

As such, the @Ne0liberal Twitter handle runs an annual “Neoliberal Shill of the Year” bracket. This self-designation partly inures them against the common criticism that they’re just — intentionally or not — carrying water for corporate interests.

By the same logic, neoliberals happily cop to being “globalists,” the anti-Semitism-tainted insult favored by the Trumpist right. Many neoliberal Twitter accounts sport a globalist 🌐 emoji — a stick in the eye of both the nationalist America Firsters and the socialists of Red Rose Twitter.

Likewise, derided as “Woke Capitalists,” an insult on the left and especially the right, the neoliberal subreddit wears the banner with pride.

Colin Mortimer, another director of the Neoliberal Project and co-runner of @Ne0liberal, says “it’s an intentional choice to be funny and self-deprecating. No one would care if we just tweeted screeds about the efficacy of carbon taxation. Instead, we make people care by making our ideas funny and digestible.”

It’s a likable self-awareness. The jokes are ornate, but the fundamental optimism of the neoliberal worldview manifests itself in their memes. They avoid the underlying nihilism of the dirtbag left.

Mortimer sees his online presence as politically essential. “Politics is increasingly happening online,” he told me. “Ascendant political ideas like Trumpism and the Democratic Socialists of America wouldn’t have been possible without the internet. So our aim is to offer people an alternative to the polarized factions that currently exist on the internet.”

Sometimes the reappropriation goes too far. The r/Neoliberal FAQ (not associated with the @Ne0liberal Twitter handle) has had to clarify that, despite their jokes, they are not thrilled with the “often degrading conditions” of sweatshops. Nevertheless, they argue, sweatshops are usually transitory and are often a step-up from subsistence farming for many of the world’s poorest.

Owning the Neolibs

The new neoliberals are in some respects millennial and post-millennial “happy warriors” in a liberal-left struggle for the future of center-left politics. Among their peers, they feel like a minority. As one indicator, on Reddit, r/LateStageCapitalism, “A One-Stop-Shop for Evidence of our Social, Moral, and Ideological Rot,” boasts nearly 10 times as many subscribers as r/Neoliberal. r/SandersForPresident has more than seven times.

One of the major fault lines between neoliberals and the more socialist left is the track record of liberalism and market-based economics in the recent past.

“The reason left-wing politics are on the rise among young people,” says David Walsh, a self-identified socialist and PhD student at Princeton, “is basically, at the end of the day, due to the catastrophic failures of American liberalism in the 21st century.”

“The support of so many liberals in the early ’00s for the Iraq War; the tepidness of the Obama administration starting with the stimulus in ’08, the failure of liberalism to stop Trump, and above all the intensification of inequality and feckless inaction on climate change. We all know this score. So I don’t quite get looking at this track record and saying, ‘more of this, please!’ on a political level.”

By contrast, Sam Bowman, formerly of the Adam Smith Institute, notes that neoliberals are often those “who think the 1980–2008 era was a good one and needs to be defended from people who want to burn it down.”

Both critics and fellow travelers of the neoliberals suggest their “trust the process” faith in markets and technocratic wonkery is partly a product of their social identities.

Samuel Hammond of the moderate (and “liberal” not neoliberal) Niskanen Center suggested “the median person involved in the Neoliberal Project is a 22-year-old college educated male” and “not conservative in any cultural sense,” but “not left in the sense of social democrats.”

It does seem true that the very secular, pluralistic, urban, and mobile outlook would appeal most naturally to young men.

Although sympathetic, Hammond worries their outlook is policy-first and community-oriented second. Without paying close attention to social contexts, policies like open immigration can generate backlash. Think the Yellow Jacket protests in France against neoliberal favorite Emmanuel Macron or, perhaps, Brexit and even Trump as a response to the lingering effects of the 2008 financial crisis.

More critically, Walsh argues, neoliberals punch above their weight because they flatter the assumptions of existing liberal institutions — think tanks, consultancy firms, and Democratic staffs.

“There’s no mass constituency among millennials and Gen Z for neoliberal politics,” Walsh argues. But “market-based solutions — usually, but not always — presented as an ‘apolitical’ means of efficiencizing policy outcomes — is still the de facto common wisdom in many policy schools.”

Perception becomes reality. The socialist left looks at the present and calls it a failure of liberal economics and policies. Neoliberals see the world improving for many, including its poorest.

“We want to provide a coherent third camp to those who aren’t socialists or authoritarian nationalists,” Jeremiah Johnson says. “And we think politics will be healthier if it’s not dominated by two increasingly extreme groups unable to compromise or even communicate.”

The cleavage between neoliberals and the democratic socialist left is playing out right now in the Democratic primary. In many ways Pete Buttigieg seems like the ideal neoliberal candidate. Biden seems to represent business as usual.

Recently, Sam Bowman raised eyebrows when he tweeted “Pete > > Biden > > > Trump > Warren > > Sanders.”

Bowman clarified to me that “we’re talking lesser of two (or three) evils.”

Nevertheless, he worries neoliberals will be divided between the understandable “view that Trump is uniquely bad and no Democratic opponent could be worse” and his view that Warren and Sanders represent “a serious threat to global prosperity.”

However, the Ne0liberal account shot back that “Trump is *uniquely* destructive” and that it’s “short-sighted in the extreme to worry about marginal tax rates or regulatory details…while Trump is taking a wrecking ball to our core institutions. It’s worrying about the rash on your leg while you’re in the middle of having a stroke.”

Woke Capitalists

When critics look at neoliberals, they see idealistic young people defending powerful, destructive forces that don’t need or deserve defending. Neoliberals firmly believe they stand for a positive politics and a brighter future.

Samuel Hammond, noting Pepsi’s historic outreach to African Americans and Subaru’s engagement with LGBT consumers, suggests basically that woke capitalism works. In search of a buck, markets break down barriers. On the other hand, he suggests there’s something to the hand-wringing about “capital with a capital C” absorbing new markets.

This hints at the main cultural critique of neoliberalism. It fosters “the model of the market” as what Wendy Brown calls the “governing rationality” of society. If we are all living and thinking, unconsciously, in market terms, how much do we sacrifice the political, communal, traditional, or sacred parts of our lives and societies? Liquid modernity may make many of us materially better off, but are we right to let the market decide in all spheres of our life? Once the logic of the market starts to dominate, it’s hard to roll back.

Colin Mortimer agrees consumerism threatens to supersede “other forms of identity and community.” But adds “people lose me when they try to make the casual claim about how neoliberal policies caused this problem.”

“At its worst,” Conor Duffy says, “neoliberalism is little more than a timid, myopic centrism that struggles to see past the status quo and the partisan interests of particular political parties.”

But “at its best, neoliberalism provides a compelling alternative to the politics of an increasingly socialist left and reactionary right.” It “charts a bold, optimistic path forward firmly grounded in the liberal values that have made so much of the world free and prosperous places to live.”

The first neoliberals — those economists from the late 1930s and 1940s — hoped to reconstruct liberal economics for the 20th century. They’re a cautionary example to today’s neoliberals. Neither the moderate ordoliberals nor the hardline libertarians truly succeeded. In Germany, the moderates ultimately blurred into the mainstream German welfare state. The libertarians, led by men like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman, couldn’t help but see any attempt to reconstruct liberalism as the road to serfdom. Ultimately, they helped build the libertarian intellectual complex today’s neoliberals rebel against.

It’s tough to defend markets while trying to reform them.