It was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump

[TomCADem]

15. How 'Neoliberalism' Became the Left's Favorite Insult of Liberals

As explained below, Neoliberalism has just become a catch-all epithet to attack Democrats from the "left" regardless of their underlying policy positions. You posted the article, then you complain that it is from 2016?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/how-neoliberalism-became-the-lefts-favorite-insult.html

The neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s has faded into memory, as its adherents failed to settle on a coherent set of principles other than a general posture of counterintuitive skepticism. (Peters’s new ideological manifesto, We Do Our Part, only mentions neoliberalism once.) But the term has been used to mean different things at different times, and it has returned to American political discourse with a vengeance. Then, as now, it is an attempt to win an argument with an epithet. Only this time, it is neoliberal that is the term of abuse.

And the term neoliberal doesn’t mean a faction of liberals. It now refers to liberals generally, and it is applied by their left-wing critics. The word is now ubiquitous, popping up in almost any socialist polemic against the Democratic Party or the center-left. Obama’s presidency? It was “the last gasp of neoliberalism.” Why did Hillary Clinton lose? It was her neoliberalism. Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz? Neoliberals both.

The Baffler’s Chris Lehmann dismisses an Atlantic story on the Democrats, which touts Elizabeth Warren as a model for the party’s future, as just more neoliberal tripe. “In the world of neoliberal consensus, it’s a simple taken-for-granted axiom that senators — the lead fundraisers and media figures in both major parties — call the shots, and should be entrusted with charting an electoral comeback,” writes Lehmann. “All the reliable notes of arm’s-length cultural puzzlement are struck soundly here, from the putative identity-politics-class-politics divide on the left to the neoliberal wonk class’s painfully absent common touch.” Obviously, the authentic way to demonstrate a common touch is to throw around the term neoliberal as frequently as possible. Try it if you ever need to strike up a conversation with some strangers in a bowling alley in Toledo.

Neoliberalism is held to be the source of all the ills suffered by the Democratic Party and progressive politics over four decades, up to and (especially) including the rise of Donald Trump. The “neoliberal” accusation is a synecdoche for the American left’s renewed offensive against the center-left and a touchstone in the struggle to define progressivism after Barack Obama.