I feel like this, in part at least, accounts for why some figures on the nominal centre left today are so uncomfortable with the term
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Replying to @LukewSavage
It's self-interested and lazy, sure. But it's also the product of how neoliberalism developed historically and succeeded.
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Replying to @LukewSavage
I think there's a slight issue when critics use the term far, far more often than the people they're attempting to criticize.
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Replying to @mtracey @LukewSavage
It inevitably invites a devolution into a semantic debate; they're are ways to formulate the same criticism without making the term central.
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Replying to @LukewSavage
I guess the point is, there are lots of shoes that can fit.
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Replying to @mtracey @LukewSavage
It's not that the term is meaningless; it's just that sometimes it obscures more than it illuminates.
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Replying to @mtracey
Could the same not be said for virtually any political descriptor though? "Liberalism", "Socialism", "Conservatism", etc?
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Replying to @LukewSavage
The difference is, lots of people self-identify politically with those terms, whereas vanishingly few seem to self-identify as "neoliberal."
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Replying to @mtracey
Right, but that's central to the point I was making: they don't identify with it precisely because the project has been so successful
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Which is why I think there may be better ways to criticize their project than assigning an identifier to them that they don't themselves use
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Replying to @mtracey
Look, I'm not advocating use of the term in every context. Its applicability obviously varies.
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Replying to @LukewSavage @mtracey
But FWIW I think there's often tremendous utility in naming things when they're totalizing systems
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