this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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'Free market,' market-oriented reform capitalism; think Reagan, Bill Clinton, any moderate or conservative before the trump era.
It has been the sole economic theory in power in the US since the 1970s, with more or less a sliding scale between more neoliberal (republicans before 2016) and less neoliberal/more classical liberal (Biden's and Harris's campaign messaging, not Biden's actual actions).
The reason it sounds confusing, especially in memes, is because you think dems and republicans have different economic theories behind their actions, when in actual legislative reality they're just more or less neoliberal, and the minute differences get overblown in campaign rhetoric.
The funny thing is that it's Trump, of all people, who represents the first genuine shift away from neoliberalism for the US in 50+ years. That fucker is downright mercantilist.
Too bad it's a shift away from neoliberalism in the opposite of the direction the leftists wanted to go.
Also a fake populist. He says things that seem like he will work to benefit the working class, but completely lies to them and screws them over at every opportunity.
The imminent $6T tax cut for the rich and corporations will be Trump’s magnum opus.
AKA "demagogue." That's the essential difference between Trump and a populist like Bernie Sanders: Trump is a demagogue; Sanders isn't.
It's a circle tho right. Eventually it will all spin back around? /s
I'm not American so I may be missing something, but I find it hard to say that, for example, Carter and Reagan shared the same economic policy, or Obama and Trump. Only by flattening away any nuance whatsoever would those be called identical.
First of all, Trump really is very different. All these tariffs are decidedly not neoliberal.
Trump aside, though, Carter, Reagan and Obama really did share broadly similar policy with regards to free trade treaties and whatnot. The Democrats were better on support for unions, but not so much better that they weren't willing to throw them under the bus of cheap foreign labor.
Their idea of the rightful role of the state in everyday affairs was rather different though, wasn't it? If support of free trade were all that's needed to be a neoliberal, anarchists would be neoliberals too.
they shared the same broad economic policy.
They don't share minute policy, they never will. Republicans have always been a more top down approach, while dems are usually more bottom up.
if you look at it in macro, you could argue this is true, but this is basically just strictly related to econ governance, which makes sense because it's the most functional form of economy lmao.
If you look at social governance there are VAST differences.
Social governance in the US is mostly window dressing. The class oppression is the same, dems just don't pretend poor whites are a higher class than other minorities. To the dem or republican leadership your gender, sex, nor race really matter. As long as you're not trying to remove the class divide then you're good enough. Even the most racist republican would happily go along with a black president as long as said president didn't threaten the economic order. Its why Obama was allowed to do as much as he did.
there is some truth here, but this is also effectively a strawman argument.
There is really poor social governance in america, both under republicans and democrats, because nobody knows how to construct it properly. Whether this is a conceited class war effort from the left, idk.