Right-wing critics have a new favorite word to malign President Obama’s economic policies: corporatism. Naturally, it’s an ugly word. Whether it evokes Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy or just an image of the rich growing richer through government collusion, it’s a vision nobody would defend. Nobody is for corporatism.

Starting with Tim Carney’s 2009 book Obamanomics the idea that Obama is either consciously or accidently enriching the well-off has become a conservative meme. The right-wing blogosphere uses it, as does conservative intellectual heavyweights like Yuval Levin. Thus liberal readers were surprised the other week to learn that the contraception mandate in health-care reform was “corporatist.” Likewise, it may have been news to you that the Dodd-Frank financial reform overhaul—the one Wall Street is perpetually fighting against—is a corporatist sop to the big banks. The Federal Reserve’s efforts to move the economy closer to something like full employment? Yet more corporatism. Ditto both the stimulus and cap-and-trade.

The “corporatism” meme is more than just another refrain for the professional right and their noise machine. In fact, it is a subtle but fascinating bit of ideological work. Talking about corporatism flags worries about power and abuse that everyone shares, allowing conservatives to claim the mantle of the populist movement. But at the same time, the folks currently flinging around the term use it to mask their doubling down on the ideology embraced by the populists’ foes: a three-legged stool of laissez-faire economics, liberty of contract, and hard money. As the historian Charles Postel notes, these current elements also formed the reactionary 19th century counterrevolution that populism and progressivism had to overcome. They also explain why the idea of any type of left and right convergence in fighting government corruption is unlikely to happen.

Behind every current right-wing invocation of corporatism is the assumption that the market would work perfectly fine if the government simply just got out of the way. Corporatism goes beyond invocations of corruptions. Whatever problems exist, it must exist as a result of the government existing and trying to do something. This vision of laissez-faire assumes a free-floating market system, one whose logic is dangerous to challenge.

Sadly, markets don’t always work, nor will they always solve society-level problems. That’s why conservatives who call cap-and-trade, for instance, corporatist, are missing the entire picture—which is how do we best deal with the onset of global warming? To point out that correcting market failures benefit some parties versus other parties is self-evidently true. The question is how do we choose to correct the problems markets can generate, rather than assuming they are entirely the fault of those trying to address them. This critique turns a blind eye to the actual problems we are trying to solve.