The Democratic Party began on the extreme side of classical liberalism’s conservative spectrum. Since then the farthest they’ve moved is the center left. Because they’re objectively a center right Party but comparatively look leftist I think Neoliberalism can accurately describe both the Democratic and Republican Party establishments.
The right libertarians basically stole the libertarian label from actual leftists. Libertarian outside of the US was used almost interchangeably with socialist and would include libsocs like Rusa Luxembourg or Lucy Parsons. The anarcho capitalists also co-opted anarchism from the left since anarchism actually has socialist roots. This is why the father of their market religion, Rothbard said it would be wrong to call them anarchists then decided to steal the libertarian label.
‘One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy … “Libertarians” … had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over. ~Murray Rothbard
Except that libertarian socialists came up with the word 150 years ago and it’s meant libertarian socialists everywhere until about 40 years ago in the US when Randian objectivists and austrian school assholes decided they needed to rebrand and so actively started a campaign to use the word for themselves.
Reaching the ironic peak of hypocrisy with Rothbard and his “libertarians” supporting the coup of Augusto Pinochet and his establishment of a military dictatorship in Chile where previously there had been an immensely popular democratically elected President, Salvador Allende.
Rothbard and co. openly celebrated the newfound “economic freedom” that came after all of Allende’s supporters had been brutally murdered and gave him full moral cover for these crimes. But all that “freedom” meant was the freedom of American corporations to enter the country and start hyper-exploiting the actual people who live there.
Famous libertarians like Friedman and Rothbard didn’t even say they hated power, they said they hated STATE power.
Friedman described corporations as the ones who would be in control and making laws.
Slapping a ™ on your government doesn’t do shit to free people.
Rothbard was very ignorant of key anarchist positions as he utterly ignores the very obvious restrictions of liberty that result from property. It is almost like he had never read Proudhon’s “What is property” nor any other anarchist thinker like Bakunin or Kropotkin, or had a proper job. So he obviously was blind (unlike genuine libertarians) to how property results in similar social relations and restrictions in liberty as the state. Thus we find him proclaiming there is no freedom of speech or association on someone else’s property – which, if the state did that, he would be up in arms about but since it is a capitalist or landlord restricting the freedom of their wage-workers and tenants then it gets a free pass.
If you know your history and understand the infrastructural and superstructural traits of capitalism, it may become obvious that liberty in this context is, and always has been, heavily rooted in property acquisition. Of important note here, by “property”, I mean private property, a particular relationship to social institutions central to capitalism. In essence, private property involves the subordination of labor to capital and tenant to landlord (among others) in those social institutions; it is the infrastructure of class society and it requires that the majority of individuals enter into these autocratically-managed institutions in order to earn wages (fractions of what they produce as workers) and gain access to the life necessities withheld from them.
Libertarianism/Anarcho Capitalism can pretty much be summed up with two sentences: “Tired of having the government’s boot on your throat? Why not try having a corporation’s boot take its place???”
Little wonders why anarchists reject both nationalization and privatization.
The term “privatization” (originally “reprivatization”) was first coined in English to explain the policies which were transfering ownership of public good to capitalists under the Third Reich.
For those reasons, I would actually make the case that not only are they in truth Neoliberal in the laissez faire sense but also part of a long running trend of resurgent fascism in the US. All the fascist regimes co-opted leftist rhetoric and imagery in order to in effect seize the state and implement pro-corporate, extremely repressive, racist, xenophobic regimes. Hitler admitted this openly in Mein Kampf, and the Left wing of the national socialist movement was eventually liquidated. “We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike.” Hitler, May 2, 1933. Hitler never really implemented many of the more “socialist” of the original 25 points of the Party Programme. He actually changed the terms of - or “clarified” - point 17 to rid it of its socialist character. Otto Strasser accused Hitler of trying to “strangle the social revolution” by “collaborating with the bourgeois parties”. He also marginalized, and later killed, many of the Socialist faction of the Party, including the Strasser brothers, Rohm, and the SA. And his general policy at least up until the war seems to have favoured business over the workers in most respects.
The roots of “privatisation"- laissez-faire ideological defenders of capitalism are very forthright in their support for “privatisation.” Many of these are also keen to argue that Hitler was a left-winger. Rather than look at the business backers and role of the Nazi regime as provider of serfs to said capitalists, they simply note that “Nazi” stood for “National Socialist.” Such are the intellectual times we live in. Given this, it comes as a surprise that a recent issue of the “Journal of Economic Perspectives” shows how the first use of the term “privatisation” was by the Nazi regime rather than, as previously, thought by Peter Drucker. According to Germa Bel, the term seems to have been first introduced into academic social science by Maxine Yaple Sweezy, although its use in English was predated by The Economist in August 1936, reporting on the Nazi plan of “re-privatisation” of certain banks. (“The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20: 3: pp. 187-94).
The right libertarians swear by their market fundamentalism they’re not really fascists or aiding fascism but that’s because they’re generally oblivious to the implications of their fundamentalism.
Republicans are just straight up authoritarian conservatives and quite openly flirting with Fascism. The Reagan Democrats are the democratic party now and will sooner beat back change from below and protect their pockets than they will actively address this rising threat of fascism. As Classical Liberalism is the founding ideology of the US it is deeply entrenched in its mainstream politics. The centrists in the Democratic Party are essentially hybrids of Classical liberalism and Keynesianism. Keynes, however, was a capitalist and agreed with most of the laissez faire doctrine, he just didn’t believe it was good policy under certain economic conditions like after a deep deflationary spiral and stagnation in the economy.
I wouldn’t even give Republicans any credit for deconstructing the state. For all that talk about muh personal liberty, they expand the state without the facade of the state increasing the general welfare or improving society for the actual masses of people in that society. They increase the state for the benefit of a handful of corporate bureaucratic types and for the draconian police and surveillance/military state.
Which is why it’s perfectly acceptable to slaughter centrists and right-wingers who are objectively and literally too inbred and retarded to serve any purpose to the benefit or continuance of society.
