As the presidential race ramps up (with depressing prematurity), big-picture political thinkers incant the usual litany of pronouncements and chin-scratching over whether such and such an ideological force is dead. Playing the death certificate card is pundit gold, a makework perpetual motion machine for political deepthink, but still worth thinking about for what it says about ideological stagnation in American politics—and a refusal to recognize from what direction the next big change ought to come.
Last week in the New York Times (alas, behind their “Times Select” wall), light-right thinker David Brooks declared “neoliberalism” dead. Neoliberalism was born of a bunch of young writers of a liberal bent in the 1980s, mostly centered around the political journals Washington Monthly and New Republic.
They were disenchanted with hidebound '70s liberalism, were sharp and fun-loving (at least compared to Jimmy Carter and/or Michael Harrington),were not entirely beholden to unions, were willing to be reformist about the welfare state, were OK with the American military, and liked to spar with their partisan comrades further to the left. Michael Kinsley could be considered their philosopher-king, and their spawn filled the mainstream of American journalism as well as inspiring such politicians as Bill Clinton, who might be dimly remembered as the president of the United States through much of the last decade of the previous century.
It might be noted, but wasn’t by Brooks, that Clinton’s most prominent political stances and achievements—welfare reform, failed attempts at rejiggering the health care system, and a clumsily executed, half-assed neo-Wilsonianism—pretty much define the politics of today as well, give or take a domestic war on terror and a new wave of pointless immigration fear.
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