Please help me out. The term-du-jour now seems to "neoliberal"

[Hortensis]

79. Today's neoliberalism equates to EXTREMIST CONSERVATISM

Last edited Sun Jun 26, 2016, 06:17 AM - Edit history (1)

It is the antithesis of modern liberalism. I am a lifelong liberal and I loathe and fear proponents of neoliberalism.

Although neoliberalism has taken good hold in the GOP, largely displacing traditional conservatism, keep moving right, especially the ultraconservative super-rich, because they are the ones who moved neoliberalism from arcane fringe extremism to mainstream university teaching and the halls of Congress.

Neoliberalism embodies everything people are so rightly coming to fear from right-wing economics, and the word itself is being used by right-wing propagandists and by some here on DU to confuse people and falsely suggest that its exploitive, predatory, antidemocratic ideology is the Democratic Party's.

Here, check this out from Dissent Magazine. Your public-to-private is in the second paragraph.

Shenk: Discussions about neoliberalism often treat it as an economic doctrine, which also means that they concentrate on its economic ramifications. You shift the focus to politics, where, you argue, neoliberalism has “inaugurate[d] democracy’s conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment.” Why does neoliberalism pose such a threat to democracy?

Brown: The most common criticisms of neoliberalism, regarded solely as economic policy rather than as the broader phenomenon of a governing rationality, are that it generates and legitimates extreme inequalities of wealth and life conditions; that it leads to increasingly precarious and disposable populations; that it produces an unprecedented intimacy between capital (especially finance capital) and states, and thus permits domination of political life by capital; that it generates crass and even unethical commercialization of things rightly protected from markets, for example, babies, human organs, or endangered species or wilderness; that it privatizes public goods and thus eliminates shared and egalitarian access to them; and that it subjects states, societies, and individuals to the volatility and havoc of unregulated financial markets.

Each of these is an important and objectionable effect of neoliberal economic policy. But neoliberalism also does profound damage to democratic practices, cultures, institutions, and imaginaries. Here’s where thinking about neoliberalism as a governing rationality is important: this rationality switches the meaning of democratic values from a political to an economic register. Liberty is disconnected from either political participation or existential freedom, and is reduced to market freedom unimpeded by regulation or any other form of government restriction. Equality as a matter of legal standing and of participation in shared rule is replaced with the idea of an equal right to compete in a world where there are always winners and losers.

The promise of democracy depends upon concrete institutions and practices, but also on an understanding of democracy as the specifically political reach by the people to hold and direct powers that otherwise dominate us. Once the economization of democracy’s terms and elements is enacted in law, culture, and society, popular sovereignty becomes flatly incoherent. In markets, the good is generated by individual activity, not by shared political deliberation and rule. And, where there are only individual capitals and marketplaces, the demos, the people, do not exist.

The article twists a little deep as it unwinds its evolution for scholars. But today's Democratic Party stands for everything neoliberalism is trying to destroy. And, yes, it also is influenced by neoliberals, which have infiltrated all areas of government to some degree, but unlike the GOP it has not fallen to them.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. ... that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." - Abraham Lincoln

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." - Abraham Lincoln

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” - Abraham Lincoln

Btw, as he so clearly evidences, Lincoln's brand-new Republican Party and its leaders bore absolutely no resemblance to today's.