The Future President, Donald Trump

It's always the same with these sad sacks. They will sit at the knee of one of these 'new' prophets who painstakingly describe in vague terms this idea du jour that is so complicated only they understand or can instruct.. And in absolute fear of being thought of as stupid, the admirers nod and act as if they just received the word of God directly from the mouths of these dim but well meaning nincompoops. Since they speak softly and describe a truckload of retro-conservative greed based nonsense, a few here seem not to realize the emperor has no clothes. Sometimes when you are surrounded by bullshit, you have to call bullshit.

By the way, I totally made up retro-conservative, but I will be using that term and a few others until some faux intellectual political guru embraces it and films a clip explaining the newest utter bullshit term.

Yeah, and it's not just the pretentiousness of all the jibber jabber about the latest, most accurate political label that makes the whole exercise egregious. It's also that the whole tendency to have this exercise I think sort of comes directly or indirectly from the Frank Luntz school of rightwing discourse warping. For anyone unaware, Luntz is the 'guru' of testing word and phrase choices, then advising the republicans which ones to use to their advantage, and how to use them. It's how liberal became a dirty word. It's why they say the "Democrat" party now, instead of the "Democratic" party. Luntz is the reason republicans stopped saying "global warming" and started saying "climate change" - he advised them it was less scary.

This talk about the use of the (in this case) term neoliberal isn't smart, or productive, or even particularly useful. Unless of course we're working on the most efficient ways to generate heartburn or migraines.

As it turns out, the term "neoliberal" is quite dated. The novelty that the prefix refers to is that of Reganomics.

Using this European term in an American context is bound to create some confusion.

I urgently need your sage council. Since only you and Lash (the other power house intellectual) understand what a frigging neoliberal is, I will list a few few names and if you don't mind, please tell me which ones are neoliberal and which are Democrats, Republicans, retro conservatives, evangelical birchers, AFL-CIO union members, or ditto-heads.

Alan Greenspan
Jeffry Dalmer
Bernie Maddoff
Mother Theresa
Pretty Boy Floyd
George H. W. Bush
Henry Ford
Steve Spielberg
Joan Rivers
Susan Sarandon
Ted Bunday
Rev. Billy Graham
Ted Kennedy
Paul Simon
Joan Baez
Darryl Issa
Nancy Pelosi

Thats probably enough right now to help me find my way in this hyper informed smarty pants club. I look forward to your help.

"idea du jour"... smh

You obviously prefer not to understand. You couldn't have read even a few lines about it and not have picked up on the fact that neoliberalism been around for decades, and it affects your life and global health and wealth drastically. But it's so much more g'bag to just go to her knee jerk stance which is to vilify the messenger of what she doesn't like.

Don't be so happy in your ignorance.

You can hide your head in the sand, but nothing you do will make it not exist.

If you read the write up about the political candidates when we used the politicalcompass site to find our own spot on the political grid, you'd see where Hillary is referred to as a neoliberal.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2016

Style more than substance separates Trump from Hillary Clinton. After all, Trump was a generous donor to Clinton's senate campaigns, and also to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary is nevertheless disingenuously promoting herself as the centrist between an extreme right-winger (Trump) and an 'extreme left-winger' (Sanders). Abortion and gay marriage place her on a more liberal position on the social scale than all of the Republicans but, when it comes to economics, Clinton's unswerving attachment to neoliberalism and big money is a mutual love affair.

Quite why Sanders is describing himself to the American electorate — of all electorates — as a 'socialist' or 'democratic socialist' isn't clear. His economics are Keynesian or Galbraithian, in common with mainstream parties of the left in the rest of the west — the Labour or Social Democrat parties. Surely 'Social Democrat' would be a more accurate and appealing label for the Sanders campaign to adopt. While Sanders claims to admire particularly the Scandinavian model, he neglects to point out that a characteristic of all social democracies is a low defence budget, reflecting not only a degree of anti-militarism, but also social spending as a priority. Beyond tinkering, though, Sanders has no appetite for significantly cutting the Herculean defence budget or criticising imperial adventures. His urging for the World's most authoritarian country, Saudi Arabia, to assert a stronger military presence in the Middle East is a bizarre position for a social democrat to hold. These odd clusters of attitudes are reflected in our placement of Sanders. Domestically the man is an undoubted progressive — not the least for his courageous attack on corporate campaign funding. But on foreign policy, you could expect a President Sanders to be strikingly similar to his predecessors.

Belligerent ignorance in the face of verified information...you've got a big loogie of it in the middle of your face.

Wipe that off, will you?

Why don't you take a gander at Oliver Marc Harwich paper on "Neoliberalism: The Genesis of a Political Swearword" and get back to all the folks you have been unwittingly deceiving. The paper was dated 21 May 2oo9, and although I don't have a link, you can goggle the title and read about it.

In part he writes:
If neoliberalism is hardly ever defined, if it can men anything you wish to disagree with, then it is understandable that it results not from an attempt to gain theoretical knowledge but from the desire to defame your political opponents. In this way, the neoliberal label has become part of political rhetoric, albeit as an almost meaningless insult...................................
..................................................................
The shallowness with which we use neoliberalism in a pejorative way corresponds inversely with the depth of though by its original users. Even more surprisingly, the original 'neoliberal' have little in common with those who are nowadays called 'neoliberal'.

The term 'neoliberal was originally coined in 1938 by the German scholar Alexander Rustow in 1938.

I've read a couple of scholarly peer-reviewed papers, and I'm reading the slim volume I linked here previously.

I don't choose to wipe away information because you and some guy don't like it or can't understand it.

Neoliberalism is a real and damaging system that developed relatively recently in modern history; it has identifying social and economic symptoms; the political movement I belong to is trying to change those symptoms by eradicating some of the contributing factors.

You can support neoliberalism or be part of the solution.

The symptoms are horrifying. Worse in the production zones...where our products are made for slave wages.

Bernie annotated a speech by Pope Francis, which begs people to open their eyes to what neoliberalism is doing to the world, and to stop it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/15/bernie-sanders-i-annotated-a-speech-by-pope-francis/?tid=sm_tw

You make me very sad, I wish you were smarter or at least had a smidgen of curiosity. It's hard work being the zealot who is forced to identify all the infidels.

Bump

Here's a clue for you: the one reading to understand a concept new to her is curious. The one refusing to even acknowledge the concept new to her is the one without a smidgen of curiosity - who lays down in her ignorance with smug misplaced self-satisfaction.

The fact that I'm a bit angry about it may be my failing. The fact that you are trying to vilify even the idea of neoliberalism is stupid.

So incredibly sad.

Yes, you are. Develop some curiosity.

Sigh, it's just so goober pathetic.

The arrogance is amazing. A poser zealot on a mission to enlighten. Yee-hah.

Ha, she sounds like a pinko-commie to me. Where else can you go and be this richly entertained for free.

I don't think any of this is funny, at the same time I think Lash is flailing beyond the beyond. Or so I did think, since I don't read up much now, and when I look in, tend to roll eyes. I am not anyone's bot.
I do think, in contrast to most of you, that she is sincere at all or most times.