The "Neo" Liberals of the Democratic Party and the Centrist Outlook

For quite a number of years those few who mention the "neoliberals" who came to prominence within the Democratic Party in the 1980s at all (a tendency identifiable with such persons as Gary Hart) have mainly been centrists (a Jonathan Chait, a Bill Scher) who, either in extreme ignorance or extreme bad faith, claim to know nothing of "neoliberalism" in the sense in which it has been more commonly used--as a term referring to an economic theory, policy, model of global significance in the way popularized by David Harvey some two decades ago in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Of course, in pointing this out it is only fair to acknowledge that the Democratic Party neoliberals did embrace neoliberalism in the other, Harvey, sense of the term, exalting markets and attacking government as they maligned social programs, labor unions and government workers as the source of the country's "uncompetitiveness," and singing odes to "entrepreneurs" and the "information age" that has been so important to the associated propaganda (Gary Hart, indeed, a Democratic party counterpart to the information age-hype besotted Newt Gingrich, with whom he found much common ground in their days together on Capitol Hill--as Gingrich himself owned). Still, these neoliberals were not embracing a label that, as yet, had not become so closely attached to the economic policy-model with which most identify the term today. Rather, certainly to go by what that key theoretician of the movement Charles Peters had to say, the "Neo" liberals defined themselves in relation to "Old" liberals in the American sense, rather than liberalism in the eighteenth century, "libertarian" sense that is elsewhere the more common usage, and which is evoked in the term "neoliberalism."

In considering that opposition I think it would be a mistake to downplay the extent to which there was a fundamental clash of economic ideas that had them on opposing sides when the "neoliberal turn" came. However, as Charles Peters spelled it out in the version of "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" he published in the May 1983 edition of his magazine The Washington Monthly, Old liberals were guilty of four particular failings not simply reducible to being wrong on economic policy, abiding by the rules "Don't Say Anything Bad About the Good Guy" (and "Don't Say Anything Good About the Bad Guys"), "Pull Up the Ladder," "The More the Merrier," and "Politics are Bad and Politicians Are Even Worse."

Unpacking all this what one got was a condemnation of "Old" liberals for attachment to particular principles, disadvantaged groups, and established programs, and their aversion to "grubby" politics--the Old liberal commitment to using government to help the disadvantaged, and the traditional Progressive insistence on honest, "clean," government--which may be usefully compared with the standard of legitimate discourse that is so central to centrism. Neither that standard of discourse, nor centrism, are explicitly raised in Peters' "Manifesto"--indeed, the meaning of these terms is rarely ever spelled out in part let alone whole in American discussion (for many reasons)--but almost always relevant to explaining American politics, then as now, because of the way it permeates so many premises and assumptions that are not always spoken, and of which they are not always conscious. As described here the centrist prides themselves on the "non-ideological," "pragmatic," "pluralistic," "civil" politics they regard as the hallmark of "adults in the room" sanity, maturity and responsibility, in which they reject principled stands and talk of right and wrong as "ideological" and "ethical" and "extremist," instead overseeing the unavoidably grubby haggling among interest groups, none more or less worthy than any others and who had best be civil toward each other and not put each other down and make reasonable compromises with each other if they were to get along and keep a liberal society from sliding down the steep and slippery slope to an Orwellian hellscape that their ideology says that anyone's doing anything else whatsoever will surely produce. Peters accused the Old liberals of having sinned against all that by defending particular groups and policies, by taking principled stands on what is right and wrong and ethical and not ethical, by being ready to be adversarial in their commitments and the "good guys vs. bad guys" view to which all this led, and their distaste for what any normal person would recognize as corruption. Meanwhile Peters stressed what good players by the centrist rules the "Neo" liberals were by contrast in talking up their supposedly "nothing is sacred" attitude when it came to doing what they thought needed to get done to "move the country forward" (their eagerness to kill Social Security and other "entitlements," their spoiling for a chance to be "tough" with labor and schoolteachers and the rest) that saw them not just ready to reject and punish supposed "good guys" but "reach across the aisle" to work with the supposed "bad guys" in the spirit of "bipartisanship" so dear to the centrist (as Hart was to do with Gingrich).

Taking the package altogether one can see this as not just an attack from the more rightward element within the Democratic Party on its more leftward element and its supporters and causes reflective of "the neoliberal turn," but (entirely consistent with that direction of attack given centrism's essential conservatism) an attack on the liberals that used centrist political theory as an important basis, one that most certainly mattered. In sneering at those who use terms like neoliberal the aforementioned Bill Scher quipped that "nobody has spotted a neoliberal in the wild since Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign"--apparently ignorant of the fact that if the exposure of an extramarital affair destroyed Gary Hart's political career (how quaint that notion seems today!), and that not in 1984 but 1988 when Hart was very much "spottable in the wild," Bill Clinton, a prominent figure in the Neoliberal movement as chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, continued to bear the standard for the tendency. And indeed, bore it all the way to the White House with, whatever Mr. Scher may think or claim to think, Charles Peters himself lauding Clinton's ascent in a piece in a not-so-very-obscure newspaper called the New York Times as "The Second Coming of Neo-Liberalism," and, of course, Bill Clinton living up to the expectations of him as a neoliberal in both senses of the term during his two terms in office, which have defined the Democratic Party ever since--and in turn, defined American politics ever since, not least through how they have again and again brought the party defeat, with all its implications for the national political scene as a whole.