NEOLIBERALISM. I want to amplify a point Badler made on David Brooks's column documenting the death of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not simply temperamentally unsuited to the times; it is an ideology that failed. The glittering vision of NAFTA's backers has not seen fit to manifest, the economic promise of Rubinomics has not sparked an enduring increase in wages. The private market has not proven capable of dealing with the health care crisis, though it's been remarkably adept at encouraging inequality. Moreover, neoliberalism, as often as not, was a reaction by highly educated, upper class journalists against the interest groups that they felt were ruining the Democratic Party. It delighted in pushing policies that proved independence from organized labor, or feminists, or the NAACP. And, in certain ways, that was healthy for a party that was publicly perceived to be overly dependent on such supporters. But neoliberalism was unable and, at times, uninterested, in solving the problems that had so radicalized these groups. It focused on the middle class and valued education and training above all. But education and training have proven false gods when it comes to correcting for the cruelties of the global economy. Urban blight remains with us, as does wage stagnation, and wage inequality across genders, and so on and so forth. In many ways, neoliberalism was something of a myopic ideology, wherein a great many influential individuals assured the Democratic Party that it could and should stop focusing on social ills that they'd never experienced. Politically, that may have been the right tactic, although I'd argue the Gingrich Revolution suggests otherwise. But substantively, it didn't move the country very far forward at all. Its lasting legacy will be the elevation of counterintuitive argumentation and sardonic detachment in the press corps., but that's a rather slight mark for a political ideology to make. --Ezra Klein
