Vance Miguel Johnson’s Reviews > The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy > Status Update

Neoliberalism is retrospectively applied to the "conservative" policies of the Reagan and Thatcher regimes in the U.S. and Great Britain

The practices of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization have resulted not in a "neutral" global framework for economic and cultural flows, as the term "globalization" implies, but rather in the transfer of wealth and power from poor parts of the world to the West, especially to the United States during the 1990s.”

The new liberal centrism of the 1990s converged with 1980s conservatism in:
Fewer social services, more "law and order" in government
a state-supported but "privatized" economy,
an invigorated and socially responsible civil society,
a moralized family with gendered marriage at its center.

“The overarching Liberal distinction between the economy, the state, civil society, and the family consistently shaped, and ultimately disabled progressive-left politics by separating class politics--the critique of economic inequality--from identity politics--protest against exclusions from national citizenship or civic participation, and against the hierarchies of family life.”

“Radicals of many stripes occasionally attacked the categories them-selves, but these challenges were successfully marginalized at each critical phase of the history of American Liberal capitalism.” Calling these people radicals rather than just activists feels like perpetuating Neoliberalism as the force with the ability to define…

During the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, "liberal" progressives argued to expand the power of the state to regulate economic relations considered at least partly "public," such as the hours and conditions of labor, while "conservatives" considered such regulation an improper interference into "private" property and contract rights.

“What the progressive-left must understand is this: Neoliberalism, a late twentieth-century incarnation of Liberalism, organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion. “

“But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classifies human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms.”