Lippman also wrote of the importance of “challenging the ruthless” with “an intuition of the human destiny which is invincible because it is self-evident.” How did the word neoliberalism go from referring to a progressive watchcry like this to being widely used as a slur?

Of course, words’ meanings change over time, more than a language’s speakers tend to be aware. Nice originally meant “unknowing”—in 1410, a Middle English source recounted (as translated into modern English), “They said he was a fool ... and that they never saw so nice a man”—and morphed into meaning “agreeable” via a series of quiet steps based on the fact that anything a word currently means harbors overtones of related, but different, meanings. An unknowing person is often timid, and thus nice came to mean timid. But, a timid person may be prissy, fastidious—and so nice had that meaning for a while. Then, it seeped into the usage that to be fastidious may be to be delicate or precise. This is why English retains an expression like a nice distinction, which obviously doesn’t refer to a distinction that makes you pancakes. But precision, as in carefulness, is a kind of agreeableness, and so what once meant “stupid” now means “kind.”

What has happened to neoliberal exemplifies this process as it occurs within a climate where ideological positions are mostly fixed but the labels that are affixed to them are subject to change. People can make up a new word, or use an old one in a new way, at any time. However, the things that these words describe often change more slowly, and lend a new word their overtones despite hopes that a new coinage could avoid or transform them.

To Lippmann and his peers, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, neoliberalism was meant as a new kind of liberalism that espoused, contrarily to what was expected of liberals, laissez-faire capitalism. The free market was thought to have conditioned the Great Depression, and came to be associated with the reviled assumption of Republicans such as President Herbert Hoover who had assumed that the economy would right itself. To these “new” liberals, the interventionist, state-directed policies of the New Deal instituted by Franklin Roosevelt had revealed themselves as equally unwise, and neoliberalism sought to strike a middle ground.

Lippmann and the other neoliberals disagreed as to just where that middle should be, but the general idea was that to be a neoliberal was to be on what intellectuals and social-justice activists would, or at least might, consider to be the proper side. The economist Milton Friedman took up the cause and became a respected celebrity, with a hit PBS series outlining his principles. Starting in the late 1970s, a cadre of writers at The New Republic, which Lippmann had helped to found, proudly bore the neoliberal label. They saw themselves as opposed to, rather than allied with, conservative organs such as the National Review.